Yesterday a friend and I had a conversation about whether
there is something inherent in the Christian faith that has
given rise over the centuries to atrocities like the Inquisition,
the witch-burnings, and the pogroms against Jews. Is there some
taint, some terrible pox bred into the Christian DNA and ready to
manifest itself when conditions permit? To put it another way, if
today's Christians suddenly had the legal opportunity to begin
burning heretics at the stake as their forbears
did, would they do it?
A conversation I had with another friend today leads me
to suspect that perhaps they would. Out of the blue came the
comment that for all his good works Mohandas Gandhi, having
studied the New Testament and rejected conversion to the Christian
faith, remained "a heathen." I asked if this meant
Gandhi was frying in Hell today. My friend refused to pursue the logic of her
claim, saying she was not God and could not say. But it was only
a strategic retreat. I know she holds that only through
explicit belief in Christ can one be saved and that a Hell awaits
those who do not hold that belief.
If someone really believes what I deem the barbaric
absurdity that God is going to slate anyone for eternal torture (an
act that would by itself qualify him as Satan's understudy,
Wormwood to his uncle's Screwtape), then even though that person
may not (thank God!) have the opportunity himself to light the
match, he is predicting that the nonbeliever will one day light up
the night like one of those trick birthday candles that will
never go out. And he is blessing that choice. If this is what
Christianity is about, even what it permits, it is Hitlerite
evil.
When we are told that Gandhi rejected Christ and thus
deserves Hell, we are told some crucially mistaken things about
Chris tianity.
First, did
Gandhi reject Christ? He demurred to undergo baptism, to renounce his ancestral Hinduism. But he lived
a strikingly Christlike life, ministering as Jesus did to
the loathsome, the outcast, the untouchable, calling them, as
Jesus did, the children of God. Has one who does this
"rejected the Son of God," as my friend maintained? No, for he who
does the works of the Son of God has accepted the Son of God. At least
in my book.
But not in my friend's book, which is the Bible. My
friend argued that the Bible says good works do not earn salvation,
that salvation comes only by accepting the death of Jesus on the
cross for one's sins.
But who's saying that Gandhi's good works saved him? No
one is saved except by grace. I am merely
saying that the lack of belief in the Christian
religion did not damn him.
She argued that Jesus says in the Bible that one must
believe in him to be saved. I cannot accept this. True, the Gospel
of John depicts him saying this, or something like it, but this
Gospel, like all other New Testament writings, presupposes a
stage of things that Jesus never envisioned, a time when his death
had occurred and was interpreted and
reinterpreted as an atonement for sins.
In John's gospel Jesus is made the mouthpiece for dogmas
which only arose at this fairly advanced stage, much as Plato
makes Socrates the literary spokesman for his own, later ideas.
Indeed, given the state at which things stood in Jesus' lifetime,
had Peter suggested to Jesus that only by virtue of faith in
Jesus could a person be saved, Jesus would have rejected the
suggestion as blasphemy, perhaps regarding Peter as insane. It means
some thing quite different for Christians to
look back on Jesus, after all the subsequent developments, as their blessed Savior,
some thing I am glad to do.
But we must not read the Bible as a flat text without the
depth of historical development that lies behind and beneath
it. If we do, as my friend does, we will misconstrue the sense of
various texts, using them for an alien purpose. But my friend is
only doing what Christians have always done.
O the ironies of doctrinal evolution! I am currently
absorbed in the reading of Deconstructionism. The father of the
movement, Jacques Derrida, speaks of "the supplement," a
strange and ubiquitous paradox whereby something that is ostensibly a
mere addition to a prior reality actually has the effect of
subverting that reality, undermining it by putting it in a radically
new light. This has happened in the case of the
Christian gospel.
In all probability, the construal of Jesus' martyr death
as an atoning sacrifice arose first in the preaching by
Greek-speaking Jewish Christians to Gentiles. The idea was current among
Greek-speaking (or Hellenistic) Jews that the martyrdoms of the
righteous at the hands of pagan oppressors might be counted
by God as an atonement for the sins of Israel.
These Hellenistic Jewish Christians were faced with the
problem of how God could accept Gentile pagans for whom there was
no Levitical provision. Temple sacrifices did not cover
their sins, so how could God accept them? Suppose he was graciously
willing to count Jesus' martyr death as an atonement for the
Gentiles? Thus Jesus died for the sins "of many," as Mark
puts it. Not all, since Jews' sins were already dealt with quite adequately
through the biblical system of sacrificial atonement. Temple
sacrifices availed for Jews, including Jews who accepted Jesus as
the Messiah, but Jesus' death availed for "the world,"
i.e., everybody outside Israel. (Christians use the same idiom when they
speak of reaching "the world" with the gospel, i.e.,
present company excepted, since they,
Christians, already have the gospel.)
So the doctrine of the atoning death of Jesus was meant
as a way of including the excluded. It was a way of widening the
scope of God's mercy. But what happened? Once Jewish Christianity
died out and Christianity had become almost completely a Gentile
religion, the notion that Jesus had died for "the world"
meant, in Gentile ears, absolutely everybody, including Jews. So the
evangelistic pogrom began. What had begun as an attempt to include had
now become a tool to exclude. You were barred from salvation
unless you believed in Jesus.
Even today many or most Christians are quite willing to
believe that if Jews do not believe in Jesus Christ they are
headed for an eternal Holocaust infinitely more hideous than
anything the diseased mind of Heinrich Himmler could conceive. And
they judge it impious not to believe so!
The same perverse reversal can be shown to have overtaken
the Reformation doctrine (possibly the Pauline doctrine) of
salvation by faith alone. Originally it meant that one need not
agonize over one's failure to carry out the law of God perfectly,
that pure, receptive faith could by itself accept the saving
grace of God. But now the preaching of grace has itself become the
most ironclad of laws! Faith has come to be redefined as
believing a doctrine about the saving death of
Christ, a doctrine one must believe, a
law of the mind that must be obeyed.
Even Paul already speaks of "the obedience of
faith," which is to make faith into its opposite, a yoke of law. If one
breaks this law by not believing in it, in the saving death of
Christ, one is doomed and damned. Thus in the supposedly gracious New
Testament we hear of an eternal Hell of torture, a monstrous notion
undreamt of in the supposedly stern, unforgiving Old
Testament. \Which Testament is the legalistic
one? You tell me!
Yes, there are New Testament texts that would provide
Gandhi's asbestos ticket to Hell, all right, but then they are
thus revealed as being that poisonous DNA that has deformed
Christianity again and again throughout its history. And there
are other terrible texts which women, homosexuals and others
have cause to fear as well.
But these reprehensible passages have subverted the very
essence of Christianity, which is, I believe, still dimly
discernible here and there in the blood-spattered pages of the New
Testament, pages stained not so much with the blood of Jesus as with
that of those whose persecution was mandated by those pages. But
their martyrdoms repeat that of Jesus himself. If their
sufferings can cause us to read Christian scripture in a new way,
perhaps their deaths at Christian hands will have saved us, and we will
have come full circle.
Robert M. Price