The Needletoe Letters. Robert M. Price
right decision. How? By faith, of course!
Here is another tactic. Suggest to your man (if a minister or fellow believer has not already suggested it to him) that he simply swat away an objector’s question: “Say, that’s a good question! Tell you what: I’ll look into it. But in the meantime, why not accept Jesus anyway?” Now there is an admirably incurious Christian soldier! He is signaling loud and clear that rational objections are mere buzzing gnats to him. He has absolutely no interest in them. He just wants to close the sale—as indeed we want him to!
There is always more to be said in these matters, but we may pick up the thread next time.
Your affable uncle,
Needletoe.
VI
My dear Wiltwing,
So your boy has been witnessing, eh? No success so far? Remember what I said in my last letter: it’s a win-win situation. A loss is actually a win, as I have tried to explain. Don’t worry, as they do, that a dearth of converts will endanger the spread of the faith. Remember, we do not care which of the religions the humans practice. It is religious zeal and devotion that serve us, that feed us. The religions are all products from the same manufacturer, like so many seemingly competitive brands of laundry detergent alongside one another on a supermarket shelf. Why then do we encourage internecine competition among the sects? Who benefits from “sheep-stealing”? Why, of course, we do! The zeal to “set straight” one’s competitors and vindicate the “true doctrine” in debate is in itself piquant and invigorating to us. Tolerance begets complacence. Zeal feeds us. And it is amazing how easy it is to prevent the zealots from noticing that they are only talking to their own mirror-images. Look at any of their books that offer refutations of “cults.” The whole thing is a one-joke comedy insofar as the critic of “cults” never realizes the obvious: he is merely playing on another team in the same league!
That said, I can tell from your letter that I had best develop a point or two at greater length. Last time I suggested that what the born-again convert has really done is to join an amenable group that offers certain emotional satisfactions, and then donned their creed like a team jersey. Does he believe in the Trinity doctrine, or deny it? Does he believe in infant or adult baptism? Predestination or free will? It is entirely a matter of what his new community believes. He will think he believes these things because they are the plain teaching of scripture, and that all who claim biblical support for another opinion are perverse, deceived, or fools. Ultimately it is no different from the unthinking exchange of one religion for another when someone marries into another faith. Emotional affirmation decides theology. If you could interrupt faith for a moment of rational lucidity and ask, “Really, what reason is there to believe in the Trinity?” your man would have to answer, honestly, “Because the people in my church are so nice.”
Consider how their witnessing, while ostensibly the sharing of a personal experience of salvation, more often than not consists simply of a kind of advertising slogan. The witness has “received Christ as his personal savior,” “has a personal relationship with Christ.” Christ has “changed his life,” he “knows Christ.” What does any of this mean? Do you think your man has the remotest idea of what these phrases might refer to? Or that they in any way describe anything he experiences? He may feel warm and secure, but does that justify this claim that he “knows Christ”? He might take it as far as holding “imaginary playmate” conversations with “Jesus” inside his head. But the less scrutiny directed to that, the better. It tends to fade under the light of examination. Even those who claim such a relationship will not be long in recognizing that such a Jesus is a mask for one’s own neurotic self-reproach, a guilty conscience with a face.
How is your man “a new creature in Christ”? What actually happens is that he is now a daily Bible reader, says prayers, and feels guilty for things he used to think innocent. His religion is a collection of formulas, which become cheer-leading once he rejoins his church group. The slogans, like the beliefs, are passwords that admit one to the group. One qualifies for membership by agreeing to mouth the slogans, defend the beliefs, and obey the rules. I urge you: distract him in any way necessary from making what one might think an obvious connection: that despite all the proud talk about “salvation by grace through faith,” he and his church actually promote salvation (membership in the saved group) by means of “works”—that is, believing assigned creedal items. There is rarely a danger of one of them noticing this, but it can happen if we are not careful. The rarity is because so few of them ever feel dissatisfaction with the party line, the ideology being a remote second to the benefits of group solidarity in any case. But suppose someone begins to question the Trinity and makes the mistake of mentioning his question within the group. He becomes a leper, and others will shy away to avoid infection. He will be told that true Christians believe in the Trinity. Or he says he loves the Bible but it seems to contradict itself, and he cannot believe in biblical inerrancy. It will be communicated in no uncertain terms that such dissent is simply not an option. If he wants to attend a debating society, he is in the wrong place. And suddenly he finds himself shown to the door. It turns out that, in order to “be a Christian,” one did in fact have to conform to a list of thought-commands, mandated beliefs. Paul called this “the obedience of faith,” failing to notice the incompatibility with his message of salvation “by faith alone.”
In the final analysis, believers are “Gnostics.” They view salvation as a matter of believing the right articles of faith. Oh, they will deny it fiercely, but insofar as their main tenets are held to be non-negotiable, they are in fact requiring “works,” forcing oneself to believe, telling oneself one does believe, what deep down one does not believe. And it is such mental gymnastics, such guilt-born, fear-generated writhings that keep us so well-fed. My heart goes out to our defenseless lambs as they try to sell the “good news” of salvation by “faith in Jesus,” and some skeptic challenges them: “What, you don’t think Gandhi was saved because he wasn’t a Christian?” It is like the old Western movies where the black-hat villain snarls, “Dance!” and fires his pistols at the victim’s feet, forcing him to hop from one foot to the other. Even so, our poor lad first counters, “Good works don’t save you! Christ does!” This is going to invite the rejoinder, “So it’s just a matter of beliefs as to whether God saves you?” They reply, “No, no. You have to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior!” Back it comes: “But Gandhi, a Hindu, admired Christ and acted pretty Christlike for the wellbeing of others!” “But he wasn’t actually a Christian. He didn’t receive Jesus as his savior!” “What, you mean Jim Bakker is saved but not the Dalai Lama? Jimmy Swaggart is saved, but not Bertrand Russell?” “Well, those guys were not genuine Christians!” And how does one know that? “They didn’t produce good works.” “So that means it is good deeds that make the difference?” In the end they seem to believe that both right belief and good works are necessary conditions for salvation, and that neither by itself is sufficient. This is a reasonable view. In fact, it was the belief of all Christians until the Reformation, when they began to tell themselves that faith alone was the key. Why not let them see the error of their ways and construct more consistent doctrines, you ask? Because it is the mental maneuverings, the grand rationalizations in which they engage, that provide sustenance for us. The oyster forms a pearl by ceaselessly excreting a substance to coat the chafing sand particle with a smooth texture.
To return to my point: they will say anything to win over a new convert, no matter how inconsistent their arguments. And this would never be so if their concern was rational in nature, rather than emotional. Once I whispered to a girl, witnessing to a stranger in a shopping mall, to argue that the Bible must be the inspired Word of God because for three thousand years skeptics have been unable to pick out a single flaw in it. For a moment her mind went back to her pastor saying in a sermon that so-and-so looked like an error, but that in fact it couldn’t be, we must be reading it wrong, because we know the Bible is the inspired Word of God and therefore it can’t have any errors! Which is it going to be? Inductive scrutiny shows the Bible has no errors, hence it must be inspired? Or that deductive reasoning from the premise of its infallibility entitles us to ignore and explain away its errors? It is the dance, the game, the pirouetting that generates what we need. A simple, direct statement of one’s faith requires no