Evangelical and anti-semitic

I learned from George Yancey Tuesday or Wednesday that the murderer at the Chabad of Poway synagogue was the exception that tests the rule: a Church-going Evangelical who commits an ideology-driven crime.

For decades, the commentariat has blamed conservative Christians for heinous crimes, routinely getting way out over their skis on it but never paying a price when it turns out the criminals weren’t regular church-goers, whatever they might have adopted as a religious label.

Still, even a blind pig sometimes finds truffles, and a broken clock is right twice per day. 19-year-old John Earnest was a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC — not to be confused with the Orthodox Church), his father was an elder and he was well-catechized, as Julie Zaumer reports, at greater length than Yancey, in the Washington Post.

Yet Earnest picked up anti-semitic ideology that managed to co-exist with his Christian beliefs.

I’m passingly familiar with the OPC, and can vouch that anti-semitism is not inculcated there, although philo-semitism isn’t as obligatory there as in the different sort of Evangelicalism in which I sojourned from age 14 through my late 20s (through parental inadvertence — our mutual Christian boarding school choice).

Zaumer does a very good job teasing out several such doctrinal niceties within Evangelicalism, as Washington Post “God Beat” reporters so often do (its Acts of Faith is a daily web stop for me). And there are tantalizingly-unexpected data, such as Earnest’s pastor being “the only African American pastor in the entire OPC denomination,” who gets accused of “Cultural Marxism” when he preaches anything about “social justice” (latter scare-quotes for symmetry).

But here I set up my soapbox.

Evangelicalism is not doctrinally homogenous. It has Churches where love of Jews is taught for the “thanks-but-no-thanks” reason that the modern nation-state of Israel is a sina qua non to an end-times script of lurid battles, a bizarre mass body-snatching by God (“the Rapture”) and such; you also have the OPC, its amillenial position being much closer to historic Christianity. What loosely binds them together as a movement is what Mars Hill Audio Journal‘s Ken Myers calls “orthopathos” (“right feeling”) or, if you want to get geeky about it, the Bebbington Quadrilateral.

A fortiori, and setting aside endless debates about who’s right and who’s wrong (spoiler alert: the Orthodox Church is right — and homogenous in Nicene dogma), Christianity is not homogenous.

Likewise, Islam is not homogenous. There’s Sunni, Shia, Suffi, and probably as many other flavors as there are Imams in the world. It is not homogenous, I submit, for the same reason Protestantism is not homogenous: disparate good- and bad-faith interpretations of a holy text held to be foundational.

If you want to say that John Earnest wasn’t a real Christian, or that his Christianity was tragically tinctured with toxic non-Christian (if not anti-Christian) ideologies, you must be prepared to respectfully entertain the same possibility about “Islamic terrorism.”

Having done so, you may conclude that Islam is more prone to terroristic ideology than Christianity, but I doubt that you could honestly and intelligently claim that Islam is uniformly terroristic, let alone the idiotic trope that it’s “not even a religion.”

I may overhear some of the internal Evangelical discussions about this incident, and can easily imagine revisiting it (the part before the soapbox, too). Already, I’ve seen Alan Jacobs link to this article.

INSTANT UPDATE: I apparently misread Zaumer. Rev. Mika Edmondson, the African-American OPC pastor, was not Earnest’s pastor, though he had preached recently at Earnest’s Chuch. The mistake was one of primacy in the story: the first pastor quoted and referred to as “pastor” and quoted as saying “radicalized into white nationalism from within the very midst of our church,” which I took to mean congregation rather than denomination.

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Heckfire and Brimstone

Twice this week, I caught snippets of NPR or APR stories about a Pentecostal preacher who stopped believing in hell. Or maybe it was a single story, replayed, and I caught different snippets.

As Rob Bell discovered, getting squishy about hell is kind of an Evangelical capital offense (at least for now, until Evangelicals’ “firm foundation” slips along the greased Zeitgeist into uncharted territory). So I was unsurprised when today’s radio snippet included that Carlton Pearson’s church had gone bankrupt and that he now is improbably preaching in Unitarian-Universalist Churches. His preaching in such churches is improbable because his preaching style is hellfire-and-brimstone, albeit without the hellfire substance any longer.

I have no reason to think that Pearson came to his new convictions dishonestly. It’s hard for me to see any incentive to deny hell in the Evangelical or Pentecostal world, even if one has a mixture of financial motivation; there’s probably more job security and money in cultivating fear of death and hell, which grows like a weed with minimal encouragement.

In Evangelicalism, although it’s pretty common knowledge that hell is a customary part of the cosmic map, there’s no Pope, Bishops, or Ecumenical Councils recognized as authoritative. If you can put some Bible lipstick on a pig, there’s nobody to say “that’s a pig, not an angel” with any real force behind it, howsoever obvious the truth or vehement the rebuttal. So if an Evangelical erases hell from his personal cosmic map, there’s at best a weak argument that integrity requires abandoning the moniker “Evangelical.”

Apropos of that, I listened as Pearson preached, in black church style, a hell-free-and-brimming-with-hope sermon that was pretty impressive in its intensity. If orthopathos, right feeling, really is the center of Evangelicalism, it’s hard to say that Carlton is peripheral, let alone out of orbit entirely.

I listen to stories like this pretty dispassionately these days. The Orthodox faith by consensus of the Fathers affirms hell, but it never has become credal (“and He shall come in glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end” — that’s it), and there have been and still are voices very sympathetic to universalism.* Though I’m with the Fathers, I cannot but admire the compassion for the world that make it hard for some to affirm hell.

In fact, despite my own Calvinist background, just about the only people in these debates about hell who totally creep me out are those who seem to feel some deep emotional need for hell to exist and for most people to go there. This classic statement from Section VII of Article III of the Westminster Confession (which Confession I loved and which statement I accepted, albeit with little enthusiasm) captures something of that feeling:

The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy, as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.”

(Emphasis added) Maybe I’m reading it anachronistically, but that bolded phrase now gives me the willies. Eternal wrath and “glorious justice” seem difficult to reconcile in a way that would permit a decent human being, at least in our current state of seeing as through a glass, darkly, to exult in anyone’s eternal torment.

Yes, anyone’s.

20 years after having left semi-Evangelical Calvinism and 40 years after having left explicit and unequivocal Evangelicalism, I find myself at a loss to understand Evangelical line-drawing, their determination that this is a deal breaker but that is not.

Nothing is more important to Christianity than proper Trinitarian doctrine, and specifically Christology. But the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood cheerfully solicited and publicized the subscription of the Nashville Statement by two men who deviate from orthodox Trinitarian views (see Alastair Roberts here). I could probably come up with a snarky explanation, but having said I’m at a loss to understand, that would be double-dealing.

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* That something is not credal does not imply that it’s unimportant. As noted recently, though, we seem to lack a vocabulary for matters that are neither credal nor adiaphora.