Christian Marketing: Selling God with Hellfire and Altar Calls

*I think I might need to preface this with a comment I've started to realise about myself... As a generalisation, I seem to take what I'm wrestling with or thoughts I have and come across quite strong and sometimes negatively in the first few paragraphs. I've found, that I usually tend to explain exactly where I'm coming from, or at least (hopefully) ground the things I'm saying in grace, in the latter half of my post/diatribe. So please try read the first few paragraphs in light of the last few - ie - what I write as a whole, and not as 2 separate thoughts. Usually the first part is in the context of the second.

If you do feel I'm coming across too strongly or painting too broadly with something, feel free to address it, and I'll try better explain where I'm coming from...

Thanks.*

I've been thinking on a strange thought lately - well a little strange to me - in that it sits somewhat contradicting my general status-quo. It's this: Are we doing people any favours when we advertise getting 'saved' as an escape from hell? The same question for the nice little altar-calls that modern Christianity is so famous for. How helpful are they really? I don't have a real answer to this - it's just something I've been pondering on - and to be honest, Dad can use anything to draw men to Him. But on the other hand I feel that firstly the whole 'escape the fire of hell' story falls so supremely far short of knowing God that it's like selling a Rolex watch only as 'something that can tell you the time'. As true as this may (or may not) be - that is never really the reason one would by a Rolex. In a similar way, accepting the gift of salvation has precious little to do with escaping hell and everything to do with learning to live in relationship with a loving God and Father.

My exception with the altar-call is a little harder to explain, although, again, I think where it doesn't sit right is that it often tends to fall short of what's really on offer. We seem to try and 'sell it' as a means to get people to 'join the club', like the more converts we get in, the bigger our 'souls commission' will be, like some elaborate pyramid marketing scheme. I suppose the simple fact that people are making a verbal commitment to accept the gift God is giving them is a at least a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it often just seems like a 'show of hands' and nothing much more. I think I've just experienced an increasing irritation with the seemingly 'pre-packaged' way we 'sell-off' this 'Christianity' thing to non-believers and the 'backslidden'. It feels so contrived, stale and life-less.

I'm not saying that no-one who's responded to the altar call has ever experienced God, I just think the whole process falls so far short of the type of thing that's on offer, although, unsurprisingly, it seems quite at home with the rather cold, stoic status of the religious club.

I rarely see someone being invited into a relationship with Abba, and I think from where I stand at the moment, if that's not what's being offered, then what's the point?

If you're a semi-regular reader of my blog, you'd know that semi-recently I've come to a place where my view of God and this whole thing we call Christianity has been seriously shaken up and turned upside down. In some ways it has been scary, but it's been life changing and exciting. I feel like for years (the last 10-15 years at least) my experience of God has almost been like looking at the back of a television. Every now and then, I might experience somthing, or get a slightly different view of God, but it's always been obscured and often plain wrong. I've felt in my gut there's something more to it. I've heard some of what's going on, but I've never had the right picture, until recently. Now it feels like someone's taken my hand and shown me that the 'TV' has another side to it- the intended side - where there's movement and excitement and I can see and hear clearer, and it all makes so much more sense.

I think that's why I'm so caught up on relationship with God. For me, I feel like I've been told that I should be happy with 'the back of the TV' - with a lacklustre Christian experience - or at least with the notion that my Christian experience is directly proportional to the amount of striving I put in. The lacklustre part was specifically because I wasn't 'trying hard enough' or wasn't 'doing the stuff'. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who's been caught up in thinking the back of the TV is what it's all about, and we're missing out on SO MUCH MORE!

That's why I'm hesitant to try and get someone saved just for the sake of it, or even to 'save them from hell'. I'm starting to feel that I'd almost not get someone to 'say the prayer' unless they get (even on a small level) what's available to them, what they can look forward to, and hopefully they've seen the evidence of that Life lived out in my own life, and the life of others. I really don't want to sell them short. All too often we live life as if we are still slaves. As if we're just servants of an oppressive taskmaster, when this 'taskmaster' is more interested in being Father to us. He has robed us, put the ring of honour on our fingers and invited us into His house as sons and daughters!

And I want everyone to realise this. I want everyone to experience this boundless grace. This unwarranted mercy, this love from this Loving Father. It's still early days for me. I still have so much to learn and so far to travel, but for the first time in my life I feel like I'm really starting to 'run this race with my eyes on the prize' - and strangely enough, it's not tiring at all. It's nothing like the draining striving I've been used to - that rather unsurprisingly got me nowhere.

I think I've said this often enough already - but it's all about Him. What we do, say and how we live is all relative to our level of understanding of the perfect love that He has for us.

Ask Him to show you how. Ask Him to guide you. It may not happen immediately. It will most probably take time and it will, almost definitely, not be plain sailing or an easy ride. It's not the kind of thing you can plan ahead for, unless we're planning to be surprised.

He is faithful and He understands that we are not. He doesn't have any misconceptions or preconceptions about us. He knows us through and through. What we do or say or think doesn't surprise Him. His grace covers our weakness, and gives us the strength to stand. Let us keep our eyes on Him, our prize, as we live within His loving embrace.

The problem of a loving god

So, a friend of my brother in law wrote a comment on my previous entry, "Does God's command to Love Him, by it's very existance, render it an impossibility?", and he has a question/dilemma that I'd like to look at in more depth.

I'll repost the important stuff from his comment here to make life a little easier:

...I've really been struggling with this question lately, maybe even to a further extreme than your blog deals with it. Here's my problem:

I feel like I do have a choice whether or not to love and follow God. However, it's a pretty crummy choice. What sort of love would it be if I told my wife "you can love me or not love me, it's your choice. I want you to choose to love me so I know your love is real and we can have a good life together. If you choose not to love me, that will hurt me but ultimately it is your decision. By the way, if you choose not to love me, I'm going to cast you into a lake of fire where you can burn forever." That's where I'm really hung up... I feel like that is the choice God has given us. How can there be any true love of God when the alternative to loving him is eternal damnation? What sort of loving being offers his creation a choice like that?
Anyway... that's what I've really been struggling with. I appreciate your blog and look forward to more posts, and if you have any input about my comment I would definitely welcome it.

Ethan Cornelius

[emphasis mine]

Ok, so to address this properly, I think it's best to start at the beginning with the preconceptions that make up where I feel you're coming from:

1. First off, I think I'll try tackle the eternal damnation thing, just because it's something I've been thinking about. I know this is a little left-field, but a good friend of mine that I trust as a strong theologian once said something about hell as we understand it isn't actually a Biblical thing. Now, unfortunately, I don't have any real references - although it is something I'm planning to follow up with him on - and I'll share what I learn and the resources I get when I get them - but I thought I'd get that in here - maybe Hell and eternal damnation isn't really what we think it is.

Following on from that thought, a very close friend of mine just posted an interesting post here [check out my comment as well, as I don't feel like repeating it here] talking about a very interesting thought where Jesus says something like "the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church, or the children of God" - his comment (referencing Shane Claiborne) was that gates don't do much attacking.. so possibly - it's the Church [God's people] that will be attacking the Gates of Hell and -possibly- rescuing those deceived by the deceiver.

Take a look at the post, he does a better, more in depth, job of explaining it - and I've commented on this a bit better there too, but I think it's a very interesting and alternate view on the whole God sending people to hell thing.

Something else that I've been thinking on is this: Why do we always presume that it's God (and by that I mean God-the-Father) that will do all the judging? We seem to see God as this harsh and horrible being, and Jesus, as our advocate trying to stave off His wrath over us, and we are all hoping that when it comes to judgement day, that Jesus will hopefully be able to stave off God's wrath on those that have said the little prayer...

Where do we get this from!? The Bible specifically says on a few occasions that Jesus is the one that will be judging, not God the Father - so if we should be fearing anyone - then I suppose, it should be Jesus. But He died for us - and actually, I believe that by Him being fully God, God died for us - including the Father and the Spirit. In some plane of reality, the Godhead laid themselves down to save their creation. As an aside from this aside, 1 John 4:18 plainly states that if we fear, it is for fear of punishment - and this fear shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. Earlier in the verse, John says - perfect love drives out all fear - so as our understanding of God's perfect love for us grows, so our fear should dissipate.

So, I hope I've placed some doubt as to whether there is such a thing as hell in the sense of a place of eternal damnation where people will be 'dying forever' in hellish pain and suffering.

I know I haven't done a good job of explaining it away, but if you are happy to take my word on it for now (I will supply the alternate arguments or references when I get them), there's a chance that Hell isn't actually an eternal place, as we often think it to be.

2. I think some of the problem with your question, is a warped perspective of God. I like what Marc said in his comment, although, I look at the whole "wages of sin" thing a little differently. I'm not so sure that it is "God being just" that brings about the "wages of sin being death". I think the "wages of sin" term is better understood in the same sense as the wages of cancer is death. What I'm meaning is that I think what it is saying is that the logical [and only] outcome of being entrapped in Sin is Death. And we chose that, by rejecting God's request/command in the garden. It wasn't something God placed us in, it's something that we ourselves moved into. Albeit, God could possibly have never placed the tree there in the first place, but then where would our free choice be - and how could we ever really choose Him. I think in His wisdom, He allowed us to make that choice so that we could make the choice to choose Him again - as I fully believe God is all about relationship.

I think that a better picture is this: We were stuck, naked and starving, feeding the pigs of a foreign slavemaster, and God paid the price for us, and offered us a place in His house as sons and daughters, embracing us in our stench and squallor, and in that place, He is offering us a Life of relationship and habitation in Him, and I believe that the gospels are full of these pictures of God as a lavishly loving Father - in the true sense of the word. What I mean by this is that He isn't loving in some arbitrary alternate manner that we don't really understand. He is loving in a 1 Cor 13 kind of way. He is loving in the sense that we know in our hearts a loving person should be. But He is also infinitely wise, and does what is the best for us, and so I think sometimes it is possible, in our finite, foolish wisdom, to misconstrue what God is doing as something that might seem unfair or unloving. Like a father that forbids his child from consuming a 2kg tub of ice cream, for instance - or stops a toddler from touching a hot stove - the child doesn't get why he can't get his own way, and may in some ways feel that his father is being unfair, yet even our wisdom knows that the father is in the right and that what he is doing is out of love for his child.

I was listening to Wayne Jacobsen's Tranformation series [link and more resources I've found helpful here], and he does such a great job of describing the cross as a cure and not punishment. That Jesus laid down His life for us as a reflection of His words: "the greatest thing a friend can do for another is lay down his life" [paraphrased] - so it was clearly as an extension of relationship. It was as if God saw a cancer in mankind that was destroying us, and yet none of us could withstand the Chemo (God's wrath) that would kill it . The only person that could withstand it long enough to destroy the cancer, was God incarnate, and so Jesus came to earth and took that Sin upon Him, effectively defeating the cancer that plagued mankind, and thus giving us Life again, and reuniting us with the Father.

This is just a side thought and something that just came to me, but if the wages of Sin is Death, and that Death is not just the 'falling asleep' kind of death (as Jesus put it) then, could it be that it is a Death that is the antithesis of Life?

So if Life in the bearer of it is eternal, then could Death in the bearer mean temporary life? Could it be that God created mankind as eternal beings when He breathed Life into us, but Sin brought Death upon us, which removed the eternal Life and replaced it with temporary life. Seeing as God is an eternal being, it would be impossible for us in Death to ever have eternal Life with Him. And so the act of reuniting man to God wasn't so much appeasing God's disdain and blood-lust, but rather, by gaining victory over death, Jesus enabled mankind to be eternal beings once more - and thereby we are able to live in the relationship that He offers us?

I don't know if I've really managed to answer your question, or given you an alternate perspective, but I think when our view of god is as you have in your question, we will always end up with a god that is neither very nice nor particularly loving. We end up with somewhat of an abusive god, dolling out nice things when we think we're doing well, but always dangling the "I'll douse you in fuel and set you on fire if you step out of line" threat above our heads.

And that is why I think we need to take an alternate view of God. To step to one side as it were and start re-aligning our view of God with what He says of himself, both Biblically and through the Spirit in our hearts.

Ethan - I hope this helps - I'm keen to hear your thoughts on this as we walk towards a better understanding of Dad..