KISS is really KISIS

Often a lot of theology seems to me to be basically angels on the head of a pin stuff - an effort at self-justification by an academic elite (of which I'm part) barely interested in serving the church. Why not just keep it simple? 

And then suddenly I remember really clear-cut, simple, theological ideas that are an absolute disaster. 

Let’s take what I was taught growing up in an evangelical milieu: Every soul  has infinite worth, and every soul is utterly sinful in relation to God’s infinite holiness and thus faces God’s infinite wrath. Pretty simple. 

This idea was used in my church to justify vast expenditures of energy and time “to save one soul.” In particular our pastor and choir director, having hauled 45 young people cross country in a couple of busses, would assure us before we kicked into the first strains of a Kurt Kaiser musical number that “it is all worth it if one person is saved.” 

I confess that at age 16 I was less concerned for the souls of the invisible people hidden by the glare of spotlights than I was in whether the gorgeous Molly would sit next to me on the bus, but even then the calculation seemed absurd. At some point you must realize that a youth choir is a finite resource, and deploying it can only be done rationally by assigning finite values to the potential recipients of those resources. 

On later did I realize that the Bible doesn’t actually support either the assertion of the infinite worth of the individual soul OR the infinite wrath of God against the individual soul. These are just ideas back-filling to justify how the sacrifice of God’s Son for a finite number of people can co-exist with the eternal existence of Hell for an equally finite number of the damned. 

(If I kept thinking what I was thinking about Molly I was probably going to Hell myself unless I came down weeping to the altar.  But the great thing about the evangelical milieu was that if you were Baptist it was once saved always saved, and if you were Methodist you could renew the entrance visa in your passport to Heaven every six months at the revival or retreat, and then in between times let your mind roam wherever your eyes took it.) 

The drive to keep things simple isn’t just a characteristic of evangelical theology. It appears in at least some forms of progressive universalism. Everyone, of any time, and under all circumstances will be saved. Boom! We’ve done away with the complex infinities of sin, holiness, wrath, and Hell and we’ve replaced them with just the assertions of infinite worth and love. We can drop all that desperate running around to save souls for eternity and focus on saving people right now.

Which would be nice but in the progressive Christian calculus the old infinities slip back through new dichotomies. It's always the oppressors versus the oppressed, the evil empire versus the poor (possibly in spirit but probably not.)  With this simple dichotomy the possibility of pragmatic change quickly gets swept away by utopian fantasizing. Oppression, like Empire becomes a metaphysical entity, possibly Satan renamed, it can never be defeated. The only choice left to humans is which side of this simple equation (a classic zero sum) they will inhabit. If you are not for me you must be against me - except he also said if you are not against me you are for me. Complicated.

Indeed there is a good deal of the old evangelicalism in progressive Christianity. Just as I grew being taught that you couldn’t be good until you repent in tears at the altar, now whatever group is identified as oppressor must come to the altar (or at least facebook page or twitter account) and repent of their sinful nature as oppressors and dedicate themselves to allying with the oppressed and overthrowing the structures of the Empire. Like the old revival preachers the progressive prophets await your confession, stern faced but filled with that inner glow of empowerment created by self-righteousness.

And that is also just too simple. In the real world we all know we aren’t sinners, or oppressors, pure and simple. Our lives cannot be reduced to degenerate and regenerate. Our actions never come down to righteous or unrighteous, oppressive or just, saved or not saved. 

And we know that the choices before a God worth calling God cannot be reduced to Heaven and Hell, the Reign of God or the Reign of Satan. Does God really have fewer choices for how to deal with a wayward child of God than a teacher has with a wayward student? Is “one strike you’re out” a reasonable rule book for God?

Where simple really fuses into simplistic seems to be when our theology turns to sexual relations. Growing up I was caught between "Its never right outside of marriage" and "Its all okay if its an expression of love." Conservative, I ended up erring to the "never right" side but under the proper circumstances might have given up my not-so-strong convictions for the "its all okay" side. Gradually I realized that the "never right" stuff was an impossible burden given the social context and "its all okay" was equally ridiculous because sexual relations are always guided by the complex ways that individuals gain power over one another. 

Both forms of simplicity were (and remain) simplistic nonsense. Whatever theology guides sexual relations has to be way more complex than "these are the rules" or "the only rule is love." 

So we need theological and ethical complexity. Real guidance for the real world. Real theology for a real God.

A comprehension of God worthy of God’s self-revelation will never be simple. And keeping it simple is stupid.