REstory 8: So Then What is the Why?
Transforming the world with love is better than (Story A) evangelism.
“So if the goal is not to save people from hell, then why are we doing any of this???” I’ve lost count of how many times I have heard this question.
We’ve been building a conversation over the past few weeks in this REstory series; focusing largely on healthier narratives about God that are needed to displace sour, punishing medieval narratives. We’ve been asking What is God Really Like? We distinguished between Story A and Story B, and we pointed out that in a survey of atonement theories, it is Legal Satisfaction and Penal Substitution (LS/PSA) that fit with Story A. I’m so grateful for the readers who have reached out by email, text, and in person to express their relief that they have clearer permission to walk away from harmful stories.
Though the process might go slower than we’d like, I think we should expect this disentangling and reweaving to take time (especially when we consider that PSA has been promoted as a core narrative for Christian identity in the West for at least 500 years).1 Predictably, when people remove that piece as a core element in their motivation, pretty soon, the next question is a version of “Wait, then why are we doing any of this?”
This is a predictable next question. It is a logical next step for at least two reasons: 1- Story A (LS/PSA) is built on hell-avoidance as its foundation and core, and 2- for people formed by this story, the view of God in Story A has become a lens for interpreting ALL of reality. Within that logic, saving the rest of the world from eternal conscious torment in hell has become the Christian’s primary purpose for existence.
That is why, for some people, questioning the Story A view of God is connected to truly shifting the center of gravity for their whole experience of reality.
When robust resources for reconstruction are at hand (and there are so, so many!), this shift is for the better, and it is quite profound and beautiful. But if ministers in power are withholding those resources (or are unaware of them) and not leading their communities in reconstruction conversations, they’re making the work much harder for folks who are floundering to find a foothold.
So back to the question: If the goal is not to save people from hell, then why are we doing any of this? I will write about hell in a future post; today, however, we’re talking about the “Why?” If (avoiding) hell isn’t the goal, what IS the goal of learning to follow Jesus? What IS the hope that makes this worth it? What IS the center of gravity of the reality Jesus offers?
I think the answer has four (connected) parts:
Invitation to Belovedness
Participation in New Creation Abundance
Training us to risk on loving others
Crowding out other gods
Invitation to Belovedness. I was taught that God loved me, however at the same time I was also given a narrative about a God who had to have a blood sacrifice in order to forgive me and be with me. That narrative also claimed that people who didn’t believe the right things would go to hell, though that didn’t come up often. But that is a really warped definition of love.
It has taken a while to unlearn the misinterpretations I inherited, but I now believe that more of scripture makes more sense in this larger narrative frame: God With Us.
Love desires to be with the beloved.
The whole canon weaves together a crescendo of complicated testimonies that are wrestling with a story about a God who is persistently pursuing presence among God’s beloved people.
Many people struggle to truly believe they are deeply loved, often because of how they’ve been treated by others. Many church people struggle to believe they are cherished by God because they know in their subconscious that the God of Story A is not loving. But, like we learn in Story B, the God who Jesus shows us wants to be with people, living among them and training them to love others like God does. This continues in the New Testament even after Jesus was no longer on the scene as Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians wrestled mightily to figure out how to be in beloved community together. People are loved into loving!2
Participation in New Creation Abundance. As I shared in Gardening Among the Galaxies, it is the Resurrection of Jesus that is the core of good news worth telling other people about. The beginning of the end of death and the promised healing of the whole world into a New Heavens and a New Earth is an expansive, joyful narrative that I’ve decided is worth risking on.
Not only that, but we start our apprenticeship of abundance right now in the middle of our ordinariness and our brokenness. The invitation to participate in the healing of the cosmos with every act of love we do means that we help make God’s project a reality. This is profoundly beautiful, and it’s more fun.3
Training us to Risk on Loving Others. Resurrection and New Creation is such overwhelming good news that we might forget the death that came before it. It is the promise that God’s life overcomes death that enables us to risk suffering in order to overcome the brokenness in the world. If God is willing to be murdered, we can risk surrendering our power and privilege. Jesus shows us a God who is willing to be killed in order to heal death with life; real power is poured out on behalf of others.
We are invited to imitate Jesus’s posture, giving away our power for others who have less power. Let me clearly state that since God-in-Christ has done the utmost release of power, this should flow through all our actions; when we hold onto square footage and nice zip codes we are denying the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. The point of a God who risks on love is to form a people who risk on love. That is God’s deepest dream, that we would be formed to truly love others just as much as we love ourselves.4
Crowding Out Other Gods. I have a different definition of “god” than I used to, but my definition of “human” has shifted too. Of all the great definitions of a human being, from a formation perspective, I think humans are desiring, imagining creatures — humans go after what they want. Humans are lovers, and whatever we’re going after is our god. What we want = desire = love = worship. Whatever we spend the most money on, plan for the most, spend the most minutes on, and dream about the most is our god, and we will be formed in that god’s image.
For example, I was formed to deeply desire the shiny, suburban, white, American economic dream, and I am exhausted trying to be free of it. The “American dream” is an economic illusion (or delusion?) that’s never yet been available without being built on a system that exploits the most vulnerable, and I can’t get it out of my imagination by myself. I need help to continually rehearse the bigger New Creation vision so that it will crowd the puny American Dream vision out of my heart. Maybe then my imagination can heal, and I can begin to participate creatively in this economy with New Creation filling my vision and determining my actions.5
Holding Them Together to be FORMED by a New WHY. All of us have been trained in harm. That’s what gods do. Instead, I want Jesus and his followers to help me grow my imagination into a much larger story that actively seeks the delight and wholeness of my neighbors. I think this is the hardest thing — loving other people is really, really hard, but we will be rewriting reality with the Holy Spirit as we do it.
Story A can’t deliver that formation because it’s too small; the god of Story A is tiny and delivers very small fruit. When individual salvation is the main goal, that tiny story leaves a whole lot of extra room for other gods like greed, supremacy, and nationalism. Those selfish gods are really happy when churches stay stuck in Story A. Instead, I want to be filled with a story that is so big that it doesn’t leave any leftover room for selfish stories. Growing into a narrative where the God who invented love continually invites me into expansive worldbuilding will crowd out puny nationalisms and train me to release selfishness in order to love my neighbors.
I am risking on the God who Jesus shows us because I think this story has more potential to train me to RISK on love than any other narrative out there. Beloveds are learning to share power because they desire the flourishing of the neighbor just as much as the self. Inhabited by the Spirit of God, they trust that their love is reshaping a Reality that will outlast today’s (and tomorrow’s) failing empires of selfishness. The God who Jesus shows us is taking up room and crowding out small stories — and this God is also making room. This is a hospitable story of continual welcome. The beloveds’ imaginations are being filled with ways they can participate in New Creation.
⇹ ⇹ ⇹
Postscript: On persuasion and pressure. When talking about the “why” of religion, many people have experienced some form of obligation or coercion into Christian faith; some people don’t find this out until they question some doctrine or practice, which then brings hurtful social consequences in their relationships.
Whenever pressure was part of the package deal, people often (even years later) will react negatively to anything that smells even a little like the religious persuasion or pressure they experienced before. It makes people feel icky, or worse, like they’re somebody’s project or prey. I think Jesus has overwhelming compassion for the ways that dignity and autonomy have been violated by religious movements, and Jesus knows that harm may take years to heal. Consent is an essential part of basic human dignity, and belovedness is always a respectful invitation.
© 2024 Ladye Rachel Howell. All rights reserved.
PSA has never had a foothold in Eastern/Orthodox branches of Christian faith.
Danielle Shroyer’s book Original Blessing is a helpful resource for unlearning the doctrine of original sin from our inherited anthropology. Henri Nouwen’s book Life of the Beloved is a good place to start to explore your belovedness. I also love Frederick Bauerschmidt’s concise book The Love That Is God. Once again, I hope every subscriber reads Trauma-Informed Evangelism by Charles Kiser and Elaine Heath.
Check out Terraform: Building a Better World by Propaganda, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right by Lisa Sharon Harper, Art + Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura, and Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright.
You won’t regret reading Subversive Witness: Scripture's Call to Leverage Privilege by Dominique Gilliard.
Check out Destroyer of the Gods by Larry Hurtado, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity by Soong-Chan Rah, and Desiring the Kingdom by James K. A. Smith.
“Empires live by numbness”
That’s a great line. True hundreds of years BCE and equally so now. Also true along the vector of scale… in big empires and micro empires. Even ones as tiny as the local holy huddles where rows of chairs and podiums and communion tables create the illusion of changeless retreat into perpetual numbness.