Infidels

Branding practitioners of other faiths as unbelievers is hardly a new thing. People have been doing it for millennia, and their successors will continue the tradition for as long as human beings still occupy the planet. (Which may not be too long.) It is a rather effective recruitment strategy, but only if you think conversions forced by shaming or by the sword are as good as conversions elicited by changed hearts. Personally, I doubt that God counts the former kind as worth much.

Although branding someone an infidel is pretty sick, we could do worse. Names do hurt people, but not as much as sticks, stones, and terrorist bombs do. And it may not be all bad for Christians to be on the receiving end, for a change, of other true believers' religious slander. Remember the pious words about freeing the Holy Land from the infidels? For all the centuries the flap went on, who the real infidels were became increasingly difficult to determine. One thing is certain: by the end, fewer infidels were staying out of the Holy Land than were pilgrimaging into it.

As early as the end of the first century, Christian churches were caricaturing people in terms of those who are with them and those who are against them. Consider, for example, an especially purple passage from First John: Anyone who denies that Jesus is the Christ is nothing but a liar. He is the antichrist, for he denies both the Father and the Son: to deny the Son is to be without the Father; to acknowledge the Son is to have the Father too.(2:22-23) Apparently, what influenced the writer's florid language was a much simpler statement from the Fourth Gospel, no one comes to the Father except by me. (John 14:6)

Statements like these abound in the New Testament. And they are not very encouraging of serious thought. Action, not thought, is what they call for: get Jesus front and center in your life, now. And reaction is what they threaten: prepare yourself for our wrath, and for God's, if you don't. What especially interests me about this kind of language is that it was hurled at people within the Christian fold as vehemently as it was at people beyond it. Why? The standard answer to this question is that believers were falling by the wayside and needed an attitude adjustment. In this regard, The Book of Revelation may be the most effective get-your-head-screwed-back-on-right book ever written.

This "falling by the wayside" interpretation is worth another look. As I understand the first century evidence, what really seemed to be jerking a lot of church leaders' chains was not that people were denying Jesus as their savior. It was that they were giving more thanks to God for their salvation through Jesus, than they were to Jesus as their God. Making salvation dependent upon acknowledging Jesus alone as humanity's savior became the official corrective to this undesired state of affairs. The result was to make condemnation of people as infidels much easier. Here we go again. We are saved by works and not grace after all, this time by the work of saying the right things about Jesus.

Ironically, Jesus' own words said far more about God than they did about himself.

When I was in seminary, one of my responsibilities in the church I served was to keep the outside bulletin board interesting to passers-by. My first morning on the job, the senior pastor handed me the keys to it while telling me what not to put up behind the glass. My predecessor, he said, once filled it with a startling invitation: Hey, People! Come to Jesus, or Go to Hell! Today, all we have to do is substitute Allah for Jesus in a second formula like this, and religion's potential for bringing about world destruction suddenly stares us right in the face.

Jesus' Way or No Way, then, is certainly one way to understand the Christian witness of faith. Worth studying also, however, is why a lot of unnamed fellow believers in the first century saw the matter a little differently. The many hints in the canonical texts about what they were like are intriguing. One hint is that although they were surely grateful that God had sent His son to them, it was God's own gracious work in Christ that was central to them. Celebrating the work itself seems to have been more important to them than fixating on the name of the one through whom it was initiated.

What Christian infidelity really is, these early witnesses may have discovered, is substituting God's message bearer for God's message, letting a perfect embodiment of the message long ago get us off the hook of striving to be that embodiment ourselves, in the here and now.