The Theology of Bizarro World
I would like to talk about Union Seminary and their Twitter feed, but first I need to talk a bit about Bizarro.
Bizarro is a traditional antagonist for Superman in the comics and related media. Comics are notorious for rebooting their backstories and continuities, so this may not be the current story behind Bizarro, but the one I am familiar with involved Superman getting shot with some sort of duplication ray. But the ray didn't actually create a clone of Superman, but instead a kind of mirror image of Superman (so, for example, Bizarro shoots cold beams out of his eyes as opposed to heat beams, is vulnerable to the kinds of kryptonite that heals Superman while being healed by the kinds that wound Superman, etc.) Eventually, Bizarro leaves Earth and creates Bizarro World, whose founding principle is to be precisely the opposite of everything on Earth, so everything that is considered good on Earth is bad in Bizarro World, and vice versa. So, on Bizarro World, Bizarro is every bit the hero Superman is on Earth, because he upholds all of the values of Bizarro World, but those values are the opposite of those on Earth. And, critically, Bizarro and everyone on Bizarro World is conscious of the fact that they are simply negating Earth values--the "Bizarro Code" is "Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!"
Now, to be honest, this is not the most interesting or creative gimmick for a comic book villain. Good antagonists have paradigms and world views that genuinely clash with that of the hero. So, sticking with the Superman mythos, Lex Luthor has smarts, overwhelming ambition, amorality and enormous monetary resources but is otherwise a normal person, whereas Superman is an alien with godlike powers but few resources and a rigid code of behavior. Superman and Luthor are completely disjunctive, and that's why Luthor is by far the most interesting Superman villain (Superman's frenemy Batman is an interesting quasi-antagonist for the same reasons). Taking the same paradigm and just reversing it produces far less actual conflict, because at its heart, the two things are really the same thing. Bizarro and Superman are actually far less different than Superman and Luthor, even though Bizarro's core concept is that he is the opposite of Superman.
So, back to the Union Seminary Twitter feed. A couple of weeks ago, a group of evangelical folks released "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel." It was a very, very bad statement, reflecting very, very bad theology--basically, the core message is that social justice doesn't matter to "the Gospel," white Christians don't have any responsibility to confront racism, and everything we have said about sex and gender is mandatory. Again, it is Very Bad.
But Union Seminary took to Twitter to refute the statement with their own counter-statement. They said a bunch of things that people of various kinds took issue with, but the one that provoked the most reactions was this one:
Faced with this criticism, Union doubled-down with another thread about salvation. Among the posts, I think the most instructive ones are these two:
In the conservative Protestant conception of the world, as set forth very clearly in "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel," the Christian religion is about, and only about, a purely private attitude or disposition in relationship to God, one that does not bring with it any sort of concrete commitments toward others in the broader world. If one is working under the premise of "Us do opposite of all [conservative Protestant] things!" then it naturally follows that the Christian religion is only about a set of concrete commitments toward others in the broader world, and has little or nothing to do one's attitude or disposition in relationship to God. And, indeed, that's what Union says--Jesus's message is about, and only about, "[e]mbrac[ing] folk on the margins, stand[ing] against imperial abuses, lov[ing] one's neighbor." Union points out, rightly, that these are not exclusively Christian values, and thus people of other faiths or no faith can be found doing those things as well. And since the paradigm here is that salvation is and can be reduced to "the one thing," then there is no real utility in believing in any particular set of things about Jesus, other than one's personal affectations.
It's also worth noticing how deeply Pelagian both of these visions are. The Union liberal Protestant model is Pelagian in the conventional way we think of Pelagianism, in that it requires one to take a set of concrete actions in order of achieve or earn salvation. But conservative evangelicalism is secretly and ironically just as Pelagian, replacing concrete actions in the world with a strange set of abstract "mental works" by which one enters into the salvation transaction. Either way, salvation is something one earns from God as a result of checking the right boxes. I have set forth my objections to St. Augustine's model of redemption in these pages before, but I am confident that Augustine would pronounce a pox on both of these houses.
There is also, in both instances, the obsessive focus on hell. As we know, in the conservative Protestant discourse, the entire purpose of the Christian life is to avoid hell, and the entire edifice of the church is about getting people out of having to go to hell when they die--the "Salvation-Industrial Complex" as I call it. But Union's critique here is not really to the paradigm itself, but rather to the sorting mechanism. Later in the second thread there is a discussion of how you can't do interreligious dialogue if you believe that the only path to God is through Jesus, because there can't be dialogue if one side thinks the other is going to hell. But that is predicated on the assumption that the end-point of all exclusive faith claims is the conviction that dissenters will suffer eternal conscious torment. That's true in the conservative Christian paradigm, because the end-point of every faith claim is "hell or not hell." But that is not universally or necessarily true of Christianity generally. If you understand salvation through the lens of the Patristic sources, especially the Cappadocian fathers, the whole second thread from Union reads like a bizarre non sequitor.
Finally, speaking of the Cappadocian fathers, both "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel" and the Union responses presume that salvation is fundamentally an individual affair. Everything is framed, on both sides, in terms of whether some discrete person will saved (with salvation almost completely undefined apart from "not in hell"). The Patristic vision (captured very well in David Bentley Hart's new translation of the New Testament) of salvation operating primarily on the cosmic scale, with us as individuals getting swept up in the theo-drama, is utterly absent from either formulation. It's all me, my, mine, salvation as a consumer product. Union and their conservative Christian antagonists are just haggling over the price.
Just as Bizarro is not the best antagonist to Superman, the Union Seminary response is not a particularly interesting or engaging challenge to "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel." Blind negation, while retaining the underlying conceptual framework, is pretty easy, and also pretty boring. The truly radical and effective critique of modern American conservative Christianity is not modern American liberal Christianity, but a mystical, non-modern, non-American (even anti-American) Christianity that is firmly grounded in the well-springs of Christianity's roots.
The conservative Christian paradigm of "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel" doesn't need to be negated. It needs to be replaced in its entirety.
Bizarro is a traditional antagonist for Superman in the comics and related media. Comics are notorious for rebooting their backstories and continuities, so this may not be the current story behind Bizarro, but the one I am familiar with involved Superman getting shot with some sort of duplication ray. But the ray didn't actually create a clone of Superman, but instead a kind of mirror image of Superman (so, for example, Bizarro shoots cold beams out of his eyes as opposed to heat beams, is vulnerable to the kinds of kryptonite that heals Superman while being healed by the kinds that wound Superman, etc.) Eventually, Bizarro leaves Earth and creates Bizarro World, whose founding principle is to be precisely the opposite of everything on Earth, so everything that is considered good on Earth is bad in Bizarro World, and vice versa. So, on Bizarro World, Bizarro is every bit the hero Superman is on Earth, because he upholds all of the values of Bizarro World, but those values are the opposite of those on Earth. And, critically, Bizarro and everyone on Bizarro World is conscious of the fact that they are simply negating Earth values--the "Bizarro Code" is "Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!"
Now, to be honest, this is not the most interesting or creative gimmick for a comic book villain. Good antagonists have paradigms and world views that genuinely clash with that of the hero. So, sticking with the Superman mythos, Lex Luthor has smarts, overwhelming ambition, amorality and enormous monetary resources but is otherwise a normal person, whereas Superman is an alien with godlike powers but few resources and a rigid code of behavior. Superman and Luthor are completely disjunctive, and that's why Luthor is by far the most interesting Superman villain (Superman's frenemy Batman is an interesting quasi-antagonist for the same reasons). Taking the same paradigm and just reversing it produces far less actual conflict, because at its heart, the two things are really the same thing. Bizarro and Superman are actually far less different than Superman and Luthor, even though Bizarro's core concept is that he is the opposite of Superman.
So, back to the Union Seminary Twitter feed. A couple of weeks ago, a group of evangelical folks released "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel." It was a very, very bad statement, reflecting very, very bad theology--basically, the core message is that social justice doesn't matter to "the Gospel," white Christians don't have any responsibility to confront racism, and everything we have said about sex and gender is mandatory. Again, it is Very Bad.
But Union Seminary took to Twitter to refute the statement with their own counter-statement. They said a bunch of things that people of various kinds took issue with, but the one that provoked the most reactions was this one:
VII: Salvation— Union Seminary (@UnionSeminary) September 5, 2018
We deny that salvation is only found through Christianity, that God's salvific grace is exclusive to any single faith or religion. Moreover, in God's eyes there is no difference in spiritual value or worth between those who are "in Christ" and those who aren't.
Faced with this criticism, Union doubled-down with another thread about salvation. Among the posts, I think the most instructive ones are these two:
4. "No one comes to God except through me," is simply Jesus' prophetic announcement that—to know and enter into relationship with God—emulate Jesus: Embrace folk on the margins, stand against imperial abuses, love one's neighbor. These aren't exclusively Christian values.— Union Seminary (@UnionSeminary) September 18, 2018
Both threads, but especially those last two posts, really put a fine point on something that I have suspected--the sort of liberal Protestantism of which Union is the archetypical source is really just the Bizarro World version of conservative evangelical Protestantism. On a surface level, it represents a negation of the principles of conservative Protestantism, but if you dig down you see that it is far more like its conservative foil than it is unlike it.6. One can still uphold the Bible's authority, personally; still believe fervently that Jesus is God-made-flesh; still worship in Christian community; still be a Christian in every meaningful sense, without saying anyone who believes differently is destined for hellfire.— Union Seminary (@UnionSeminary) September 18, 2018
In the conservative Protestant conception of the world, as set forth very clearly in "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel," the Christian religion is about, and only about, a purely private attitude or disposition in relationship to God, one that does not bring with it any sort of concrete commitments toward others in the broader world. If one is working under the premise of "Us do opposite of all [conservative Protestant] things!" then it naturally follows that the Christian religion is only about a set of concrete commitments toward others in the broader world, and has little or nothing to do one's attitude or disposition in relationship to God. And, indeed, that's what Union says--Jesus's message is about, and only about, "[e]mbrac[ing] folk on the margins, stand[ing] against imperial abuses, lov[ing] one's neighbor." Union points out, rightly, that these are not exclusively Christian values, and thus people of other faiths or no faith can be found doing those things as well. And since the paradigm here is that salvation is and can be reduced to "the one thing," then there is no real utility in believing in any particular set of things about Jesus, other than one's personal affectations.
It's also worth noticing how deeply Pelagian both of these visions are. The Union liberal Protestant model is Pelagian in the conventional way we think of Pelagianism, in that it requires one to take a set of concrete actions in order of achieve or earn salvation. But conservative evangelicalism is secretly and ironically just as Pelagian, replacing concrete actions in the world with a strange set of abstract "mental works" by which one enters into the salvation transaction. Either way, salvation is something one earns from God as a result of checking the right boxes. I have set forth my objections to St. Augustine's model of redemption in these pages before, but I am confident that Augustine would pronounce a pox on both of these houses.
There is also, in both instances, the obsessive focus on hell. As we know, in the conservative Protestant discourse, the entire purpose of the Christian life is to avoid hell, and the entire edifice of the church is about getting people out of having to go to hell when they die--the "Salvation-Industrial Complex" as I call it. But Union's critique here is not really to the paradigm itself, but rather to the sorting mechanism. Later in the second thread there is a discussion of how you can't do interreligious dialogue if you believe that the only path to God is through Jesus, because there can't be dialogue if one side thinks the other is going to hell. But that is predicated on the assumption that the end-point of all exclusive faith claims is the conviction that dissenters will suffer eternal conscious torment. That's true in the conservative Christian paradigm, because the end-point of every faith claim is "hell or not hell." But that is not universally or necessarily true of Christianity generally. If you understand salvation through the lens of the Patristic sources, especially the Cappadocian fathers, the whole second thread from Union reads like a bizarre non sequitor.
Finally, speaking of the Cappadocian fathers, both "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel" and the Union responses presume that salvation is fundamentally an individual affair. Everything is framed, on both sides, in terms of whether some discrete person will saved (with salvation almost completely undefined apart from "not in hell"). The Patristic vision (captured very well in David Bentley Hart's new translation of the New Testament) of salvation operating primarily on the cosmic scale, with us as individuals getting swept up in the theo-drama, is utterly absent from either formulation. It's all me, my, mine, salvation as a consumer product. Union and their conservative Christian antagonists are just haggling over the price.
Just as Bizarro is not the best antagonist to Superman, the Union Seminary response is not a particularly interesting or engaging challenge to "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel." Blind negation, while retaining the underlying conceptual framework, is pretty easy, and also pretty boring. The truly radical and effective critique of modern American conservative Christianity is not modern American liberal Christianity, but a mystical, non-modern, non-American (even anti-American) Christianity that is firmly grounded in the well-springs of Christianity's roots.
The conservative Christian paradigm of "The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel" doesn't need to be negated. It needs to be replaced in its entirety.
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