This project is not intended as a theoretical critique of evangelicalism. It is an attempt to understand anew the ‘good news’ that is the legacy of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. But the need to understand anew arises because there are, I think, serious structural flaws in the edifice of the modern evangelical mind. In this section we will attempt to identify these flaws and suggest some general corrections and adjustments that might be made to the way in which Christian truth is commonly understood and articulated.
Speaking in code
Evangelicalism has always defined itself by means of a dogmatic and highly religious rhetoric. This rhetoric appears most clearly in the various statements of faith that evangelical churches and institutions adopt. But it is not confined to doctrinal texts. The peculiar language of evangelical faith manifests itself across the spectrum from the heightened language of worship and prayer to ordinary Christian speech. Given this pervasiveness we should regard it as representative of a whole way of thinking which embodies and articulates the essential content and character of what we call ‘evangelical Christianity’. In effect, what we wish to identify here is that form of social discourse which specifically differentiates the body of committed believers from other social groups. For convenience we will refer simply to the Code, using the capitalization to mark this as the particular ‘code’ of evangelical discourse.
The Code of evangelical discourse provides the intellectual infrastructure and resources by which a person relates to the world specifically as an evangelical. We neither interpret nor address the world directly. We do so through a set of culturally determined rules of expression and argumentation. In other areas of social engagement other codes may apply, and for the most part we switch quite easily from code to code as we move, say, from the business environment to the scientific to the religious.
The Code is a matter of public commitment: its function and value are most apparent in the public sphere. Although it certainly shapes private thinking too, its influence is less secure, its role more ambiguous. A person’s private thinking may sometimes diverge quite significantly from the public discourse to which he or she professes adherence. This may simply be the means by which we cope with the peculiar stresses of maintaining the validity of the Code; it becomes very easily, however, a matter of hypocrisy.
1. What the Code does
i) It organises and prioritises ideas and values. It determines, for example, that beliefs about the resurrection of Christ are more important than beliefs about the role of women in church leadership. It sorts information into different categories - facts about the world, facts about God - and assigns different truth values to these categories. It provides the protocol, the rules and etiquette of debate, by which we negotiate different opinions. Divergent views are harmonised, brought into equilibrium; seriously deviant positions are isolated and eventually expelled.
ii) The Code provides a shared terminology, a common dialect, that gives coherence and familiarity to thought; it creates fellowship and community. This coherence also has an important emotional aspect to it. Christian rhetoric is meant not only to persuade rationally but also to move people towards repentance or love or commitment or worship.
iii) The Code maintains a set of rules for analysing and responding to intellectual difficulties. For example, it provides a set of commonplace arguments for ‘resolving’ the problem of evil.
It seems likely that the Code developed in the first place in order to bridge the gap between the believer and the primary sources of faith. This gap is itself a complex phenomenon: the forces that have driven it open are hermeneutical, doctrinal and intellectual. There is, first, the problem of understanding a religious text that originated in an antiquated and alien culture. Secondly, there is the need to reduce the complexity and historical contingency of this text to a manageable, user-friendly body of teachings. Thirdly, there is the need to resolve the intellectual problems that inevitably arise when we attempt to give an ancient religious text such as the Bible a central and authoritative position in the modern mind.
The Code, therefore, forms an interpretive structure between the mind of the believer and the text of Scripture. It provides a synthesis or synopsis of biblical truth, the end-product of the process of sound biblical interpretation. But it also becomes, inevitably, a starting-point for interpretation. We generally find ourselves immersed in evangelical discourse before we make the attempt to read the Bible, and as a result it forms the grid by which we interpret and domesticate the difficult, unfamiliar ancient text. The Code functions as a tutor - Paul might have said a ‘pedagogue’ - guiding, but at the same time controlling, our understanding of the text. Often, of course, it becomes an excuse for not reading the text at all.
2. The rules for relationships
As an extension of this mediation between the mind of the believer (and potentially of the non-believer) and the written sources of faith the Code also establishes an interface - the rhetoric and ground rules - for other significant relationships, particularly the relation of the believer to God, to other believers, and to the world.
i) The Code provides the language of worship and prayer. It generates the practical forms - the songs, the formal and informal liturgies, the methods of personal devotion, the contexts for prayer - through which we relate to God. It defines a protocol for ‘approaching the throne of God’. It contains a catalogue of appropriate emotional responses to God, warnings against false conceptions of God, criteria for determining what constitutes a valid and effective spiritual life, standard diagnoses and remedies for when the spiritual life breaks down.
ii) How Christians relate to one another is also to varying degrees a function of the Code. We may find ourselves under pressure to express sentiments with which we are not entirely comfortable using language that sounds distinctly unnatural. The Code is used to distinguish insiders from outsiders, the spiritually adept from the non-spiritual, the panjandrums and pundits of evangelicalism from the ignorant masses.
iii) The Code also mediates, finally, between the believer and the world. It interprets what we encounter around us, it answers the questions for us. It has the purpose of maintaining the plausibility of serious Christian commitment within a hostile, or at best indifferent, intellectual environment.
To some extent the Code simply provides an alternative to the prevailing rationalist discourse, an account of things that is more compatible with a theistic and biblical world-view. This alternative discourse may co-exist with rationalist discourse or it may endeavour to displace or exclude it. Creationism is a subset of the Code that aims to displace current secular explanations of cosmological and biological and anthropological origins. Other evangelicals, however, are happy to view the biblical account of creation as essentially a mythical narrative, running parallel to the scientific story, that aims to answer a different set of questions. Sometimes the Code may engage more constructively with other discourses - in the manner, for example, in which evangelical thought has drawn on popular psychology and psychotherapy on occasions. In other areas the Code remains largely silent. For example, while speculation that life might exist elsewhere in the universe plays a prominent role in secular discourses, it barely impinges on the Code.
What is wrong with the way I think?
Although other areas of life have their own distinctive discourses, the Code differs from most in that it is fundamentally at odds with the prevailing worldview. As an intellectual position it is insecure, exposed to attack on all sides from those who find the premises and claims of Christian faith either irrational or incredible. Unsurprisingly, this encourages a defensive mentality, a retreat into the closed loop of fundamentalism. Built into the code are various rationalizing strategies, defence mechanisms, which are designed to sustain it in the face of criticism. These strategies, however, can become problematic.
1. Problems of the closed loop
There is a strong reliance on the inner coherence of the Code and the emotive power of its rhetoric at the expense both of its relation to historical reality and of its engagement with other discourses and worldviews. Truth is handled almost entirely as a function of what is said, rather than as something that has to do with the relation between what is said and what actually is. Statements are judged to be correct primarily according to whether they are in agreement with other normative statements. We give up on the difficult and unsettling task of determining and articulating the inherent truthfulness of Christian beliefs, their openness to the real world of thought.
The normal procedure for rational enquiry makes truth the end-product - and generally only a provisional end-product - of a disciplined process of reasoning or experimentation. The Code, in effect, reverses the process. The believer is first told what to think. Reasoning is then permitted little more than the ancillary and emasculated function of seeking a plausible rationalization for the conclusion - a pseudo-rationality, characterized by short-cuts and evasions.
The Code turns in on itself, closing itself off from the domain of general rationality. It ceases to be subject to the checks and balances of critical thought; it becomes difficult to ask questions, difficult to probe. There is much in the Code that Christians have trouble making sense of - and probably trouble believing. But unless a convenient answer is readily available, questioning is discouraged and doubt is treated as the spiritual equivalent of the AIDS virus - the breakdown of a person’s spiritual immune system, probably as a result of spiritual promiscuity, making them a serious threat to the health of others.
The defensive mentality also means that the Code as a whole is strongly resistant to being updated. We are still attempting to navigate the world of biblical truth using a map drawn before the invention of modern cartographical techniques, before even the discovery that the world is round. But we have become so attached to this antiquarian relic that we are loathe to replace it with something more accurate. And if it means getting lost occasionally, so be it!
2. Loss of personal intellectual integrity
One symptom of the breakdown of intellectual integrity is the gap that opens up both at an individual and at an institutional level between public confidence and private doubt, between the simplistic affirmations of popular Christian culture and the hidden uncertainty and even anxiety that tend to arise when a person begins to think seriously about the grounds for faith.
People find themselves making a commitment to the evangelical enterprise for reasons other than the inherent truthfulness of Christian discourse. They believe because of a personal sense of the reality of God. They believe because of the attractiveness and support of Christian community. They believe inspite of the lack of credibility - and to maintain that belief they must suspend their critical judgment, either because they are afraid that they will bring the house of cards tumbling down, or because they fear being condemned by the ever-vigilant guardians of spiritual correctness, disqualified from ministry, ostracized from the company of the faithful. In other words, they are put under pressure to be dishonest.
This faculty of critical judgment, however, is our principal safeguard against being deceived. Admittedly, our capacity to discern the truth may be corrupted - by egotism, by prejudice, by ignorance, by the constant pressure to conform; and this may seem to justify running the Bible through the blender and spoon-feeding the believer with bland doctrinal pulp. But this is second best. We do not help the cause of truth by pretending that the difficulties are not there, or that they may be conjured away by waving the magic wand of faith. We do not bring people to spiritual maturity by suppressing the questions and doubts. In the long run, that is likely to stunt spiritual growth and engender neuroses.
A strong Code is bound to engender hypocrisy because it places much higher demands on those who are publicly committed to maintaining it. The church becomes increasingly dependent on the Code as a sort of public persona, a persona designed as much to impress (or suppress?) its members as to attract outsiders, and so the temptation arises to keep the dysfunctionality hidden away - the doubts, the moral failure, the spiritual inadequacy.
This is, in the effect, the old struggle between religion and grace. Evangelical religion has become a highly intellectualized affair, and the compulsion to conform to religiously mandated standards of behaviour has moved in an inward direction. But the basic issue is the same: we put our faith in the soundness of our discourse as a guarantee of righteousness; rather than stand naked before God, we wrap ourselves in the dogma and pieties of the Code.
3. Dissociation from the grounds of truth
The rhetoric of evangelical discourse is thoroughly biblical. Ironically, however, the prevalence and popularity of the rhetoric obscures a deeper disconnection from the literary and historical reality of the Bible. This disconnection is exacerbated by the need to reinforce the inner coherence of the Code. Coherence is generally attained at the cost of connectedness; contemporary relevance is achieved at the cost of historical reference.
The Bible is routinely misread in the interests of maintaining a semblance of consistency and orthodoxy or of artificially enhancing its credibility. While in principle evangelicalism attributes the highest authority to Scripture, in reality it is often the Code, with all its commonplace presumptions and beliefs and arguments, with its articles of faith and its four spiritual laws, with its dictionaries and commentaries, that decides how Scripture is to be read and expounded. Instead of asking, ‘What does this text actually say?’ we ask, ‘What is this text supposed to say?’ The Bible is read through the grid of post-biblical doctrinal formulations. Scripture is twisted - albeit with the best intentions - to conform to our simplistic preconceptions.
There is the further danger that we come to think that familiarity with this rhetoric and participation in these forms is the means by which the life of faith is activated. In fact, there is a strong tendency to suppose that assent to the content and rhetoric of the Code is the life of faith. Faith, in other words, is reduced to belief. What drives this reduction is the fact that belief is more concrete, more easily demonstrated, more easily verified, than faith. It is relatively simple to measure conformity to the Code, more difficult to evaluate either one’s own or another’s love or faith or truthfulness.
This has serious implications for the project of Christian discipleship, which can become little more than an exercise in cultural assimilation. Because the Code is so central to the management of Christian life, a great deal of effort goes into learning the language and mannerisms and procedures prescribed by it, and in practice this becomes a substitute for helping people either to know God or to serve God. When faith becomes problematic, the answer is sought not directly, through engagement with God, but by resorting to the Code with its rather too easy rationalization of the paradoxes of spiritual life. The assumption is that the intellectual machinery of the Code has broken down and must be repaired, not that a relationship has broken down, not that there has been an existential or spiritual failure - of trust or obedience or experience.
Finally, the Code may disconnect the mind of the believer from the world around. Either we allow our religious thinking to become compartmentalized, or we misrepresent to ourselves the seriousness of the intellectual challenge.
4. Truth is made inaccessible to outsiders
The gospel, which is a story about the accessibility of God, is made less accessible by the difficulty of entering into this closed loop of truth. The problem here is not that belief in Christ entails a radical change of thought - that is unavoidable. It is rather that the wrong kind of change is demanded, a shift not within the sphere of reality with which a person is familiar but from one sphere of reality to another. When it becomes too difficult to maintain the credibility of the Christian story within the common sphere of rationality, an artificial sphere of rationality is constructed - a glasshouse.
This allows the story to be told and believed, but to the outsider this sphere is much more akin to fantasy or fairy story than to the real world. Much contemporary criticism of Christianity is aimed at breaking down - or deconstructing - this artificial sphere, this world of make-believe truth. To many this has been shocking, as iconoclasm has always been shocking; but it has had the very salutary effect of forcing the church to reconsider the worldly relevance of the gospel, the credibility of the Christian story within the common sphere of rationality. It should not be the responsibility of the outsider to enter the loop in order to believe. It should be the responsibility of the church to relocate the gospel on the ground of everyday, secular rationalism - so that God may be made accessible. That, of course, will have some serious implications for how we tell the story.
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