THE PERSONAL
SAVIOR
RECLAIMING
THE LANGUAGE OF PIETY
Young
Evangelicals are on the move, politically, theologically, spiritually.
They move in different directions, but their point of departure is the
same. All are reacting to the Evangelical or Fundamentalist tradition of
their upbringing. Much attention has been paid to where they are
heading, but scant attention has focused on this equally intriguing
question: Will Young Evangelicals put their past behind them in the
sense of repudiating it, or of seeing it as a starting-point beyond
which they must grow? Many would seem to intend the latter. Yet it is
often difficult for them to demonstrate any thread of continuity with
their revivalistic or pietistic background. Wes Michaelson attests this.
I think that's typical of many people who go on
this journey from an evangelical or fundamentalist background. The
language, the terminology, so many things so totally turn one off. We
still want to put our roots down there.... But I had to look to
other places... than my evangelical tradition for making the inner life,
the spiritual life, the presence of Christ, vitally real. I found it
primarily through a Catholic tradition. 1
Richard J.
Mouw speaks of a similar journey, though one more in the direction
of mainline confessional Protestantism: "neo-evangelicals usually become
'progressive’ by moving in the direction of confessionalism.” 2
As they move in this direction, Mouw asks, Will they be able to maintain
any Evangelical distinctive? “What, finally does the evangelical label
come to? For many of us, it comes down to the fact that there are basic
elements in the evangelical understanding of the Christian message and
life style that we cherish and do not find adequately treated in
nonevangelical Christian groups.”
Among these Mouw includes “an emphasis
on the need for a 'personal relationship’ with Jesus Christ as Savior
and Lord of one's life”3 Interestingly, both Michaelson and
Mouw raise the question of the language of evangelical pietism.
Michaelson grudgingly admits that it “turns him off," whereas Mouw see s
enough value in it to want to retain it in a new synthesis. But common
to both writers is a certain unease. Both are reluctant to leave the
rhetoric of pietism behind, but neither seems to know quite what to do
with it.
In the
present essay we will attempt to point the way toward a solution to this
difficulty. We want to indicate some important difficulties entailed in
conventional evangelical spirituality, together with some ways in which
key concepts might be broadened. If this effort is successful, we may
have
helped clear the
way for a reclamation by Young Evangelicals of the religious language of
their forebears.
Let us begin with the phrase, central in importance,
mentioned by Mouw, the claim to have a “personal relationship with Jesus
Christ." Just what does this slogan mean? How is it possible to have a
"personal relationship” with an individual of the past? Granting that
Jesus rose from the dead and is alive today, how can one “relate" to him
as to another flesh-and-blood individual? When asked what their
“personal relationship” terminology refers to, Evangelicals will often
press for an apparently literal application. Much of the rhetoric
suggests literal interaction between individuals. A beloved hymn
describes how “he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I
am his own,” etc. A common evangelistic slogan defines Christianity as
“not a religion; it's a relationship.” Robert Boyd Munger’s ingenious
My Heart Christ's Home 4 reinforces this understanding in
the minds of many readers who take his parable in a pretty literal
sense.
A couple of problems immediately become apparent.
Everyday relationships between individuals depend upon conversational
interaction available by sense impression. Conversations may be carried
on at long distances and with time intervals (say, by letter or
telephone), but there must be such interaction. Is Jesus available in
this way? Obviously not. When someone claims that “I speak to him in
prayer; he speaks to me through the words of the Bible, 11 this is
really metaphorical.
A related difficulty is the individualized,
concrete picture of Jesus implied in such a claim to have a personal
relationship with him. If the risen Jesus is still another individual
like ourselves, like he was during his earthly life, we are forced to
ask absurd questions like, Has Jesus gotten older and wiser in the two
thousand years since the Incarnation? Or, how does he listen to all
those prayers at the same time? (Of course, New Testament texts such as
1 Corinthians
15:45 and
Ephesians 4:10 would make the whole idea seem inappropriate from the
outset.)
Richard J. Coleman at least sees the first problem here.
A personal relationship with Jesus is different
[from ordinary personal relationships] insofar as we will never have
the opportunity to know him in his earthly existence. The relationship
must therefore be formed on what we can learn about Jesus secondhand [by
reading the gospels] rather than by a firsthand experience; but this is
no different from forming a personal relationship with someone by
correspondence. 5
Though Coleman
does sense the difficulty, his solution is inadequate. As we have
suggested, correspondence by letter is in fact firsthand experience of
another in that he is communicating specifically and intentionally with
you. Coleman's suggestion would also imply the possibility of
"personal relationships" with Julius Caesar by reading the Gallic
Wars, or with Abraham Lincoln by reading Sandburg's biography of
him. The point is not that Coleman has not said anything significant.
It is merely to point out that he has failed to justify the use of
"personal relationship'! language for the kind of religious experience
he means to describe, ie., an "encounter" with the Jesus of the
gospels.
Let us dwell a moment upon the real religious
value in Coleman's argument. His idea is very similar to that of
nineteenth century theologian Wilhelm Herrmann. Herrmann contended that
Christians experience the power and love of God only in the New
Testament's portrayal of the "inner life" of Jesus. As we are transfixed
by the picture of the personality there revealed, we are flooded by the
grace of God. According to Herrmann, "the communion of the Christian
with God" is mediated by our loving apprehension of the portrait of
Jesus in the gospels. However, Herrmann vigorously denied that this
devotion is tantamount to a "personal relation with Christ”6
which pietists even in his day claimed to have. This latter, he said, is
an illusion. The apprehension of a portrait of someone's "inner life" is
not a relationship with that person himself. Coleman's argument really
amounts to Herrmann's view that the New Testament picture of Jesus is
essential to Christian devotion. This would certainly be a valid point
worth making, but since there is no interpersonal give-and-take,
"personal relationship” language is not appropriate as Coleman tries to
argue.
Several UFO cultists and Spiritualist mediums have claimed that Jesus literally communicates with them via internally "heard" voices. But evangelicals do not seem to want to make Jesus into a disembodied "spirit guide" or "space brother.” An analogous phenomenon that is accepted in Christian circles concerns occasional visions of Jesus. These are granted to certain individuals, usually Pentecostals. In these appearances, Jesus actually speaks to the individual, giving a particular direction or word of comfort.
Again, we may gladly recognize the spiritual value of such occurrences, but this kind of thing is not likely to be what evangelical pietists refer to with their "personal relationship" language. They themselves recognize such experiences to be rather extraordinary, different from that "relationship!' enjoyed daily by all believers.
Perhaps the pietists mean that they experience the reassuring presence
of a divine providence in their lives. This is obviously true; there is
no question that they experience this. But again we have to ask if
"personal relationship" terminology is appropriate for this. One may
pray to such a divine presence, and one may even interpret general
feelings of comfort and reassurance as a response to one's prayers. But
is this really the kind of give-and-take interaction between individuals
implied in a “personal relationship”? Along the same lines, it must be
asked why such a spiritual presence is to be characterized as “Jesus
Christ”? Do not all religious people of whatever persuasion claim to
experience such a divine presence guiding and comforting them? Obviously
in principle there cannot be much continuity between the concrete
individual known historically as "Jesus Christ” on the one hand, and
such a rather amorphous benevolent “presence” on the other. One may
reply, “Yes, but it is through faith in Jesus Christ that I experience
this 'benevolent presence.’” Once again we have an altogether valid, and
valuable, point here. But it could more accurately be communicated with
language like “I know God through Jesus Christ.” This phrase, unlike the
phrase “I have a personal relationship with Christ,” has a solid
exegetical foundation in the New Testament. And like the latter, the
former is already a venerable part of evangelical vocabulary.
A final
inadequate meaning of the Evangelical claim we are discussing is what
might be called the “figment of faith." Many Christians, in effect,
mentally imagine a picture of Jesus listening to them. They pray to this
imagined figure and even think themselves to receive some kind of answer
or guidance from it. This phenomenon is perhaps most analogous to that
of a child’s "imaginary playmate” with whom he pretends to frolic when
there are no flesh-and-blood playmates about. Herrmann comments:
It is of course not difficult for an imaginative person so to conjure up the Person of Christ before himself that the picture shall take a kind of sensuous distinctness...Someone thinks he sees Jesus Himself, and consequently begins to commune with Him. But what such a person communes with in this fashion is not Christ Himself but a picture that the man’s own imagination has put together. 8
C. S. Lewis
describes a similar state of affairs in The Screwtape Letters.
The veteran demon describes a Christian at prayer:
If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many... ingredients. There will be [e.g.] images derived from pictures of [Christ] as He appeared during... the Incarnation. . . . I have known cases where what the [person] called his "God" was actually located. . . inside his own head. . . . [Such a Christian will be] praying to it- -to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. 9
The line between
faith and imagination has been completely erased in Ruth Carter
Stapleton's "inner healing." Here, the troubled are told to envision a
past trauma, then to imagine Jesus coming into the scene to,
e.g., reconcile the participants. The result is an "inner healing"
effected by an avowedly imaginary appearance by Jesus! But
if this were not reductio ad absurdum enough, we need only turn
to the InterVarsity booklet Homosexual Struggle to find the
personal savior becoming an empty screen onto which any trial of the
believer may be projected. On the strength of Hebrews 4:15-16, the
author "realized that if Jesus 'in every respect has been tempted
as we are, I then that must include homosexuality!" Yes, Jesus “knows
from personal experience what homosexual temptation feels like.” 10
So here we find an evangelical saying that Jesus was gay! And all
because "nobody knows the trouble I've seen; nobody knows but Jesus."
But, abuses aside, we need not deny the religious
value of even a devotional "figment of faith" if one is able to avoid
making an idol of it as Herrmann and Lewis warn against. In a Tillichian
sense, such an imaginary figure might truly function as a transparent
"symbol" through which the worshipper encounters the Holy itself. But
once such a figment is recognized for what it is, a better alternative
might be sought.
Do I have any such alternatives to offer? Let me
suggest two. The first is suggested by the insightful analysis of
theologian Don Cupitt. 11 A familiar distinction is often
made by evangelists between "knowing" and (merely) "knowing about" Jesus
Christ. The idea is that the rather impersonal, abstract, and
secondhand knowledge about someone is vastly inferior to personal
knowledge of (i.e., acquaintance with) that individual. This is
no doubt true in the realm of knowable individuals like ourselves. But
we have just seen how difficult it is to place a "relationship" with
Christ in this realm. Cupitt suggests that a slightly different
distinction be drawn. There is a personal kind of "knowing about"
that is superior to an impersonal kind of "knowing about." For
instance, we may know about love theoretically, say from movies or
psychology books, but it is quite a different thing to know about love
from being in love. In the latter case we are not “acquainted with" love
as if it were a "Thou" in its own right, but we can say we "know love"
in that we know about it from experience.
In the same way we could meaningfully claim that
we "know Jesus Christ" without claiming personal acquaintance with him.
We could “know" him in that we truly discern and grow in the presence of
his Spirit as encountered in his Word or his Body, the Church. The
difference is obvious between this, and a trivial "knowing about"
Christ in that we merely know, e. g., that he lived two thousand years
ago.
Though Cupitt’s redefinition salvages the term
"knowing Christ," it does not deal directly with our phrase "having a
personal relationship with Christ." Here our second alternative can
help. Let us call attention to what I believe was the original
connotation of this phrase. Keep in mind the revivalistic context of its
origin. Revivalists felt that the churches were full of "nominal
Christians" to whom commitment to Christ was a rather abstract
proposition. It was a mere religious inheritance from one's culture.
"Faith" in Christ was impersonal and cold. In this context, revivalists
pressed home questions like "You may intellectually believe Christ is
the Savior, but do you take him as your personal savior?" Was
one's relationship to Christ merely one of social convention, or was
it a personal relationship? In short, the issue was not whether you
related to Christ as to an individual person, rather whether you took
your commitment to Christ as a matter of personal (existential) concern.
The "personal" is focused on my side of the relationship, not
Christ's.
Of course this element is still very much present
in Evangelical rhetoric, alongside the dubious claims to know Jesus as
an individual personality. We merely suggest that greater clarity would
result if "personal relationship" language could be restricted to
meaning "personal commitment." The phrase itself need not be discarded,
as long as in using it Young Evangelicals are careful to avoid the
conceptually confusing dead ends reviewed earlier.
Traditional pietists often speak of “claiming the promises," "claiming
the victory" of Christ. Such Christians,
absorbed in the self-discipline of sanctification, tend to focus
myopically on the application of Christ's death to the private internal
struggles of piety. The strong impression is given that God sent his
only begotten Son, the second person of the Trinity, to earth to be
crucified and resurrected just so the pietist can become a nicer guy, or
have a blissful "quiet time." Witness the song by Keith Green, "My son,
My son, why are you striving? / You can't add one thing / to what's been
done for you / I did it all / while I was dying / Rest in your faith /
My peace will come to you.”12 Or the devotional anecdote
circulated among pietists:
One evening a
Christian lay on his bed reading the Bible, and began to laugh for joy
at what Christ had done for him on the cross. Suddenly God's voice was
heard, demanding, "You mean after all the pain and agony my Son went
through at Calvary, you can laugh about it?" Hesitantly but
honestly, the believer answered, "Uh… yes, Father." He was relieved when
God replied, "Good, because that's why he did it!"
Thus the reality
of Christ is effectively limited to an energy source for individual
sanctification, even for spiritual coziness.
In all fairness, it might be objected, certainly
there is a larger, cosmic dimension to the fundamentalist's
faith--doesn't he believe after all in the imminent parousia of Christ
to judge and recreate the world? Yes, he does, but note that this schema
often serves to defer dealing with worldly reality, referring it to
"some glad morning... in the sweet by-and-by.” The world will be
reformed only in the Millennium. In the meantime the practical function
of this belief is to prompt the pietist to ever greater efforts at
individual sanctification.
The whole business becomes less puzzling if we
see it in the larger context of the fundamentalist worldview.
Acquaintance with Evangelical and Charismatic devotional literature
makes it clear that believers tend to regard all external events and
circumstances as having no neutral or independent significance, but
rather as being God's instruments to perfect the soul.
Whether weal or
woe, God is believed to have ordained everything 13 either to
teach the believer or to chastise him toward greater Christlikeness.
I
believe that, probably unconsciously, the pietist does virtually the
same thing with the cosmic victory of Christ. He makes it into a mere
function of his pietism! Christ’s death is imagined to have been just
one more instrument for the believer's spiritual growth. This is
probably never explicitly stated in their literature, but it is the
missing piece of the puzzle. To sum up this line of reasoning we might
apply the image of a telescope. The introspective pietist tends to look
through the wrong end of the instrument and reduces Christ, the object
of his gaze, to tiny size, rather than using it properly to bring a
distant reality into manageable view. Or to return to our earlier image
of the "figment of faith," we may say that the pietists’ redemptive
drama is a miracle-play acted out inside his own head.
But suppose one turned the telescope back around?
A Christian might stop making himself the focus of all heavenly and
earthly events (an amazingly ego-centric posture, really). Instead he
might realize, so to speak, that his small planet is only one of many
orbiting a greater sun, he might begin to see the same light that
illuminates him, shining on other people, other areas of life and
culture. Instead of grabbing all the grace for his own selfish
sanctification(!), he might try to apply the gospel to the larger issues
of the world around him. And who would be "minding the store" of his
soul in the meantime? Perhaps now the Holy Spirit might be freer than
ever to do his work, with one less would-be helper. As Bonhoeffer
pointed out in The Cost of Discipleship, the true righteousness
never appears when we look into our own souls; it only appears when we
are mindful, not of it, but of Christ.
Finally, let us consider one more stock phrase in the vocabulary of
Evangelical devotionalism, the claim to have “given one's life to
Christ.” Other devotional clichés shed light on the meaning of this one.
For example, "I don't want Christ to be first in my life anymore; I just
want him to be my life." Or, "Of course you can't live the
Christian life; only Christ can live it (through you)." Basically the
idea seems to be that one gives one's life to Christ instead of
continuing to live it oneself. Revivalist John R. Rice seems to advocate
this sort of thing when he extols "soul-winning," or personal
evangelism, in the se terms: "To be absorbed in the greatest task in the
world and [to] have all one's powers, all one's energy and enthusiasm
harnessed in this great work certainly does simplify the matter of
living right.”14 Tim LaHaye counsels: "Never ask, ‘What do I want to do
about this?’" Instead, one should somehow let Jesus make all daily
personal decisions. 15 So one’s time, energy, and will are to
be consumed on the altar of faith.
----------
The poor fundamentalist is sooner or later left
with scarcely any interests or amusements at all, if he takes certain
"spiritual” rhetoric seriously. For there is the constant exhortation to
make a “fuller" or "deeper” commitment to Christ, and to put down every
"idol” remaining in one's life. These terms are not specifically
defined; they need to be general so that each individual may let the
Holy Spirit convict him of what fuller commitment will mean, or just
what favorite possession or pursuit or relationship is a "stumbling
block" to spiritual growth. Now what happens to the zealot who is pretty
much selfless already? What “idols" are left for him to smash? In
reality none, but he must go on smashing, so eventually every innocent
thing that is near and dear to him will be fingered by his overactive
conscience, and marked for destruction. Every base is covered, for if a
particular pursuit must seem innocuous even to fellow fundamentalists,
one still may be haunted by Bill Gothard's all-encompassing taboo
“Others may, you cannot.” Thus one may feel “convicted" of a thing's
sinfulness in the acknowledged absence of any reason for thinking it
sinful!
All
this adds up to what Gordon Allport called “the immature religious
sentiment.” This kind of commitment to Christ “is not really unifying in
its effects upon the personality. Excluding as it does whole regions of
experience, it is sporadic, segmented, and even when fanatic in
intensity, it is but partially integrative of the personality.”16
Again, this is what Paul Tillich called "idolatrous faith” which
suppresses legitimate interests of the personality. True faith, by
contrast, is always a "centered act" of the whole person. I have argued
that what Evangelical pietists often mean by "giving one’s life to
Christ" implies that one is henceforth going to sit on the sidelines and
let Christ do something or other with his life. It is rather like giving
someone else the keys to your car; you won’t be driving it any more. But
let us experiment with a different analogy. What if “giving your life to
Christ” were more like writing a book or a song and then dedicating it
to someone else? Then such a commitment would imply something more like
this: “I will live my life in all its fullness, enjoying my interests,
and making my decisions responsibly. And the whole resulting tapestry I
present to Jesus as a gift, which I hope he will enjoy as I have.”
What
of our original concern? We have seen various aspects of
traditional devotionalism which make Young Evangelicals uncomfortable
with that
piety. But we have also seen that many even of the most central
beliefs
can be understood in more realistic and humane ways. These
beliefs when clearly
defined turn out to accommodate less narrow and introspective
forms of
faith. The result is that Young Evangelicals may without
equivocation
claim to have a "personal relationship with Christ,” i.e., their
commitment to Christ is intentional and sincere. They may
“appropriate
the victory of Christ” claiming his promises in their cultural
and
political, as well as devotional, pursuits. They may "give
their lives to Christ," happily giving a "royal command
performance" of
an "act" that is their own.
Now
perhaps our analysis will not persuade traditional fundamentalist
critics of the Young Evangelical movement to widen their circle to
include the latter. But for Young Evangelicals who find themselves in
the quandary of Wes Michaelson and Richard J. Mouw, it may be a relief
to know that the circle was wider than they thought, that they haven’t
necessarily fallen outside it.
FOOTNOTES
1 Wes Michaelson in "A Conversation with Young
Evangelicals,” Post American, January 1975, p. 7.
2 Richard J. Mouw, "New Alignments:
Hartford and the Future of Evangelicalism,” in Peter L. Berger and
Richard John Neuhaus (eds.) Against the World For the World (New
York: Seabury Press, 1976), p. 109.
3 Ibid., p. 110.
4 Robert Boyd Munger, My Heart Christ's Home
(Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1978.
5 Richard J. Coleman, Issues of
Theological Warfare, Evangelicals and Liberals (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1972), p. 44.
6 Wilhelm
Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1971), p. 283.
7 I owe this
comparison to my friend Jeff Gregg.
8 Herrmann, p.
281.
9 C. S. Lewis,
The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan Co., 1970), pp.
21-22.
10 Nancy, Homosexual Struggle (Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1978), p. 22; and quoting John White on p. 23
of the same work.
11 Don Cupitt,
Christ and the Hiddenness of God (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1971), see chap 12, "Claims to 'Know’ Christ,” pp. 184-197.
12 Keith Green
and Melody Green, "When I Hear the Praises Start,” April Music, Inc.,
1977.
13 Merlin
Carothers, Power in Praise (Plainfield, N. J.: Logos
International, 1972), p. 102.
14 John R. Rice,
When a Christian Sins (Chicago: Moody Press, 1954), pp. 122:-123.
15 Tim LaHaye,
Ten Steps to Victory over Depression (Grand Rapids: Zondervan
Publishing House, 1974), p. 15.
16 Gordon
Allport, The Individual and his Religion (New York: Macmillan
Co., 1974), p. 62.
By
Robert M. Price
====================
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