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Pollyanna Preachers Learning the Gospel from the Agnostics

Pollyanna Preachers Learning the Gospel from the Agnostics

By Mark Gauvreau Judge
Prison Fellowship Ministries

"When I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of [H]is enemy."

This line, penned by a remarkable new theologian, isn't the theology you usually hear in contemporary Christian preaching. Indeed, every night I watch preachers on TV who claim to be spreading the Gospel-but, in fact, many aren't. Christianity once preached hope in a world fallen under the control of evil forces. It now preaches optimism that sees the hand of God in everything.

This is probably why the line above is shocking (even though it's a simple declaration of Christian dogma.) Somewhere in the "Me Decade," or the "Grunge Era," or the rise of self-help movements, Christianity forgot the devil. We forgot that some things don't come from God.

Today, one of the most popular preachers in America is an insufferable Pollyanna: Joel Osteen. He preaches out of an Enormodome in Texas and sounds to me like a mixture of Dale Carnegie, twelve-step blather, and the Joker. Unlike the Joker, however, Osteen doesn't seem to believe in evil-or free will. To him, every event under-and around-the sun is the work of Divine Providence. Lost your job? God's got something better prepared for you. Flat tire? God's just testing your patience. Home and family wiped out by Hurricane Katrina? The hand of Jesus. Child accidentally killed? It's the will of the Maker.

Sadly, that last example is not an exaggeration. Janet Parshall, one of the most popular fundamentalist radio talkers, once described how her son was accidentally shot and almost killed. In the midst of understandable grief, Parshall suddenly reined in her emotions: "If the King of the universe wanted this to happen," she said, "then so be it."

This "God-makes-every-single-thing-happen" tripe has become so common in Christianity that we sometimes forget that it borders on heresy. The quote which opened this article-that one sees in the face of a dead child not God, but God's enemy-was written by David Bentley Hart. Hart is an Orthodox theologian and the author of a remarkable little book titled, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?

Hart is no liberal. His writing has been published in the conservative religious magazine First Things and in the Wall Street Journal. (The Doors of the Sea actually began as a Journal article.) He believes that the modern world will never find its way without Christ. Yet in the aftermath of the tsunami disaster, he found himself partly siding with the agnostics. He too rebelled against the idea that God would capriciously wipe out 250,000 men, women, and children (an idea pushed by what Hart calls "the sadistic bellowing" of a preacher in Virginia-Pat Robertson?). Hart observed: "More exasperating [than the cry of doubters that there is no God] were the attempts of well-intentioned Christians to rationalize the catastrophe in ways that, however inadvertently, succeeded only in making the arguments [of the atheists] seem at once both germane and profound." If God is behind the tsunami and everything else that happens, Hart notes, then God is nothing but a pure expression of will-an expression that leaves no room for freedom.

This is no small point. If God is in charge of every bird, bug, and breeze that ever occurs, we have no autonomy. Furthermore-and this is Hart's most compelling point-to say so is to contradict the actual message of the Gospel. Christ did not call leprosy, disability, and death "good things that come from heaven." He came to overthrow those things, to conquer that which is rejected by God. According to Hart, this is why the atheists (who refuse to see God in the bodies crushed by the tsunami) offer a "more radical" and real interpretation of the Gospel. Their reason, their sense of the natural law, compels them to demand more of God.

I should also admit that Hart challenged my own shortsighted theology. As an orthodox Catholic, I believe in redemptive suffering-the idea that suffering can be borne in service to the church and others. Yet, as Hart points out, this does not make all the suffering of the world (and the suffering of millions of non-Christians) "somehow wholly meaningful and therefore unscandalous." If all suffering is a way to balance some cosmic balance sheet, then "divine prominence would be indistinguishable from fate." Christ's saving act would be nothing but a sacrifice to even the scales.

That's not Christian philosophy, and it leads to embarrassing episodes of Christian optimism-people attempting to rejoice at funerals, shrugging when they get hit by a car, and reciting affirmations when their kid is accidentally shot.

The alternative is to admit what has been basic Christian dogma for centuries: Evil exists in the world. Indeed, there will be times when it seems to have the upper hand. Still, God does not will it. Evil exists because our rebellion brought it into the world-or because God needs to allow total freedom if our love for Him is to be real and genuinely joyful. Love must come out of freedom: The greater the latitude of freedom, the greater the faith, the greater the hope, and the greater the love. Yes, those agnostics are right about one part of the Gospel: Freedom sure beats being a piece on a cosmic chess board.

--Mark Gauvreau Judge is a freelance writer who lives in the Washington, D.C. area and the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep (available from Crossroad General Interest). His book, Damn Senators: My Grandfather and the Story of Washington's Only World Series Championship (Encounter, 2003), is now available in paperback.

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