More Beliefs Worth Doubting

A while ago, I began a Top Ten List of beliefs that I claimed, only a little whimsically, Christians might be better off without. By the end of that column, I had gotten through six of them, and promised somewhat vaguely to get to the other four sometime. Well, here they are. Which of them should be last, and which first, I leave up to you.

We will never really change society until we first experience a change in our own hearts. There is a lot of truth conveyed in this affirmation. Part of it is that social change is a very high priority for Christians, and that working to bring it about is something we should be doing practically all the time. Another part of the truth is that positive social changes have a better chance of lasting when the people who are affected by them are themselves changed for the better in the process. Actually, the only thing wrong about this belief is that little word, "first," in it. Putting it in there all too often turns a principle for bringing about needed social change into a rationalization for never even beginning. If we have to "set our hearts" right in order to make things better for other people, then they had better not count on us for very much. What God asks us to seek first is the Kingdom. If we get a changed heart at the beginning of doing so, so much the better. But even if we do not, we can still be sure of getting it by the end.

The Bible contains all that we will ever need to know about anything. At least, this is what a lot of uninformed Protestants have been saying since the Reformation. The implication is that Christians are people of one, and only one, book. Any other books and any other kind of learning can only distract us from, or even undermine, the foundations of our faith. This strange view is a far cry from what Protestantism as a whole has stood for through the centuries: the view that the scriptures contain the truths that are necessary for our salvation, but not all truth whatsoever. In 1763, John Wesley took an interesting tack on the issue at a meeting with his lay preachers. Pushed hard for permission to rely only on the Good Book, Wesley admonished his interrogators that going this route would be tantamount to setting ourselves above St. Paul, who relied on many books and not just one.

People with strong faith do not get overwhelmed by fear or anger. I hear this a lot, especially when someone is not only overwhelmed by these feelings, but is also guilt-ridden from having them in the first place. The fact of the matter is that fear and anger are exactly the way that we "should" respond in all kinds of situations, so much so that not feeling anxious and resentful can sometimes become even more problematic for us than the stressful situation was originally. A good example is the harm we do to ourselves by not acknowledging our fear and anger after a significant loss. Jesus himself got angry a lot, and felt sheer terror at least once, during his own lifetime. In ours, especially now that they must be lived in the aftermath of "9/11," not honoring feelings like these can dangerous both to our health and to our survival.

There is no salvation apart from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Many Christians are such because they feel very deeply and personally the presence of the Risen Lord in their lives. Some of their friends, however, are the Christians they are simply because they have been raised that way, or simply because the Christian way of life makes sense to them. Is the first group "saved" and the other not? Possibly, but only God can possibly know for sure. What interests me especially about Evangelical Christians' insistence that we have to make a conscious, personal decision for Christ is the implication that any relationship with the Lord has to be forged by us, that God's prior decision to draw all men and women to himself in Christ doesn't count for as much. Sad but true to say, there is a great deal about humanity's relationship with God that is one way, and running in the opposite direction: God keeps on embracing us, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

This column ends with a disclaimer. No one Top Ten List can fully encompass all the beliefs out there that are being entertained seriously by Christians who would be better off by setting them aside. And so, someday, when you least expect it, you just might be looking at still another list, or two, or…

Bill Clinton in Biblical Perspective

My first reaction to the release of Bill Clinton's autobiography was amazement, that the book's first reviewers could tell us so quickly what we should get out of it --- not much.

Frankly, I doubt that these guys could have read it carefully enough to reach this conclusion responsibly. More likely, they had their minds made up already about Mr. Clinton's make-up, and they used what they encountered in cursory looks at his book to fill in around the edges of long locked-in certitude. And so, they ring only the same wind-worn chimes about the Clinton era. Hillary's book got the same treatment.

For all of their tendentiousness, however, the early reviewers of My Life nevertheless have been able effectively to re-launch the one rhetorical shower-blast, to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard, that will keep on pummeling Bill Clinton until, in a phrase of his own, the last dog dies. Its theme is the squandering of the opportunities that the former President's immense talent and political gifts opened up, however briefly, to the American people. He could have done so much, the refrain goes, if he weren't --- check your own favorites --- so hungry for others' admiration, so wonky about social policy, so self-aggrandizing, so disloyal to faithful associates, so priapic, so… so… so…

Two things about this indictment should be more troubling than they have been, especially to people who strive to be as loyal to their country's principles as they are faithful to their churches' biblicism. The first is the anomaly of demanding a transcendent perfection in the leader of a government whose system of checks and balances presupposes the fallibility of every citizen, and the importance of keeping power diffused across three branches rather than concentrated in just one. The system works best when we keep expectations of all politicians on the low rather than the high side, and aligned with what we in fact get from most of them: something a lot less than their best, because they and we almost always act from what is less than the best in us.

Clinton's presidency is likely to be remembered more for the scale of its missed opportunities than for the missed opportunities themselves. Bigger than most of his predecessors in so many different respects, Clinton's humanness simply requires a bigger mural for its full display. Nine hundred plus pages haven't even begun to do it.

The second thing to note about the squandered opportunities refrain is how foolish it sounds against a major theme of the Bible. Lest we forget, both the Old and New Testaments are crammed to overflowing with references to people who misuse from the first moments of their appearance in history every last one of the divine capacities with which they are endowed as part of their created nature. The pages depict in all their ingloriousness people who represented with an eerie perfection the pattern which each and every one who comes after them exhibits shamelessly to a world falling steadily under the sway of a widening human corruption. As we have in every one of them from Adam to Saul (both of them), we have met the enemy in Bill Clinton, too --- and the enemy is us.

A lot of people have allowed themselves either to be charmed by Bill Clinton, or to excoriate him, for the same reason: he is just the kind of rascal they themselves would most like to be. There is something especially ironic about this. For of all the dishonorable people we love to read about, Mr. Clinton seems the least willing to carry our own yearnings for us. He is too preoccupied with his own. Perhaps it is his failure to accommodate us in this regard that made impeaching him so irresistible, even though we surely should have known that dissipating so much vital energy for governing the country on such a preposterous cause called us into question far more than it did him.

Bill Clinton can serve as an important and helpful case study for those of us who are working hard at becoming better loggers, that is, seriously committed to getting the logs out of our own eyes rather than fixing their gaze on the specks in others'. He serves even better than does the woman taken in adultery as an example of someone at whom we can with great profit practice not hurling the first stone. He is, after all, only --- a man, merely human. Just like everyone in the Bible is, at least until the really human one finally showed up.