Israel Folau, the democracy sausage and the book of Daniel.
- Mike Flynn (Vicar)
Israel’s Folau’s famous tweet warning various classes of sinners that they are heading for hell has at least hurt and embarrassed many Christians while giving non-Christians yet more reasons to steer clear of Christianity. It has not helped that those who have wanted to defend Mr. Folau’s right to post the tweet have said it is indeed a summary of the Bible’s teaching on the future of sinners while claiming the rights of religious freedom for Mr Folau’s post. Many who are striving to live by the grace reported in the gospels and epistles do not want to be associated with those bold condemnations - not because we have lost confidence in the Bible’s ethical teaching or are naive about how destructive some of our life choices can be, but because condemnation of the world was not the way of Jesus.
Some of the words below from John 3 are often quoted by evangelists on street corners. It is worth considering their immediate context.
God so loved the (sinful, dark, anti-God) world that he gave his only Son that whoever entrusts themselves to him will not perish (be left to go the way of the world) but have eternal (renewed) life. For God did not send his son to condemn the world but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
The condemnation is not given by God, it is not a place we are sent to, condemnation is our home. It is who we are and too often it is what we choose or are trapped by. All fall short of our own ideals let alone the glory of God - to summarise the opening chapters of Romans. Jesus did not come to add to our self condemnation but to free us from it.
You should ask at this point, what of Jesus teaching and warnings elsewhere (eg. Matthew 23) where he pronounces woes and warns about hell and its torments? For it is true he speaks more of hell than any other Biblical teacher. What of dark angels imprisoned in Jude or Peter’s letters or the warnings about anti-Christs in Paul and John? What of the lake of fire in the book of Revelation let alone Paul’s lament in Romans for his own self-condemned people?
The strangest thing about Jesus teaching is that his woes and warnings were kept for the religious and successful whose habit of thought was to condemn those who could not meet their standards (the end of John 9 being the most humorous instance of these). He taught that people of ill-repute (John 4), the undeserving son and the beggar at the gate (Luke 15 & 16), the lunatic and the prostitute enter the Kingdom of Heaven ahead of those who are able to trust in their own self sufficiency rather than the help, healing and grace of God (Matthew 7:21, 21:23). Many among the undeserving and self-condemned come to a point where they realise their need (1 Corinthians 1:26-28). Many amongst the distracted self-reliant do not (Matthew 18:24-30).
The age old battle between between good and evil does not happen primarily outside us (though it is expressed there) but the battle is first within us. There are not good people and bad people (what maddening pride that conclusion is) - in the Bible there are only fractured saints who take hold of what God offers for their need and often brilliant sinners who don’t. A friend of mine described the judgement of God in this way. He was an atheist and became a Christian partly in response to a dream that he said felt like a waking vision. In this dream he saw a tidal wave that he knew was God and his choice was either to run towards the wave and dive into it or turn and spend eternity fleeing it. If the metaphor is changed from water to the fire of God’s glory we read about in the Bible you have a good description of the experience of heaven and hell. Through the cross of Jesus, the giving of God’s only Son for all that condemns us (even ourselves), we can dive into and begin to be changed by the eternal flame of God’s presence now, or we choose to leave ourselves to the hell of self condemnation, forever fleeing God’s unavoidable reality and our own regrets.
These are the two final freedoms. Our freedom to choose God or not, and God’s freedom to be finally and gloriously himself to all he has made. In the clash of those freedoms is our heaven and hell.
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Any tweet that can be read to imply that we save ourselves is the seed of the darkest heresy humanity has ever known. It is the primordial arrogance of every foolish age in our history. So it is a painful irony that we Christians are sinners in need of grace, we are in need of accepting forgiveness for our own wrongs and of giving forgiveness to those who have hurt us - even praying for our enemies and doing good to those who hate us... and yet in our political life and witness we are tempted to turn the guns of moral condemnation upon those who have not yet taken hold of grace. How can those who have been given mercy not wish to show it? How can we boast of our relationship with God as if we somehow deserve it? Jesus did not come to condemn the world but to save it.
Our current teaching series on Daniel has driven home to me how our culture is not the church anymore and we cannot speak to it as if it is. I tried to imagine Daniel and his friends writing notes of condemnation about the culture and peoples of Babylon and Persia. There was much to complain about from the point of view of Hebrew ethics and theology, in fact, the visions of Daniel describe all governments in this world as types of sub-human beasts. But Daniel and his friends are wise in how they speak to their world. They work out what issues to play or comment upon, what issues to let go through to the keeper and what issues they are prepared to die for if necessary. They majored on major issues. This is the wisdom we need when engaging with our own time and place as the people of God living in exile in democratic Australia.
I fear that when part of the church engages in political action and words of condemnation for government and sections of the Australian population that this approach cannot work for us because it is not the wise service we need to offer in our time of exile. Hearts and minds are not won when we over-play the religious freedom card or engage in lobbying for virtue causes. Who can do true virtue without grace (1 Corinthians 6:11)?
When we go political we are in effect engaging in a power struggle and all the world hears is us insisting upon the pretence of outward acceptable virtue - the kind of virtue called hypocrisy by the founder of the church. We then end up implying, against our own doctrine, the heresy of self-salvation - that we need to be, or at least appear to be, a certain type of person in order to be acceptable. When we do this we are engaging with the world exactly in its own terms, therefore, we have already lost. We have stumbled at being servants of God or the culture, as Daniel and his friends were called to be. We lose the kind of influence that can only be gained through long years of self-sacrifice in prayer, life and witness; living evidence of outrageous grace and outright miracle. We risk affirming, rather than undermining, the nihilism that constantly threatens contemporary politics.
I am glad not to live in the absolute monarchy of ancient Babylon as Daniel did. I am glad for the privilege of our democracy sausage election this year. Though, like any sausage, it was not pleasant to watch it being made, eventually we elected a parliament. I say parliament and not party or collection of policies because though party and policies dominated the public spectacle of the election campaign, what we actually elect in a functioning democracy is a conversation, a debate. We need a conversation because, historically, evil has arisen when the people elect only one idea but we also need to elect a conversation because to elect a party or a policy portfolio does not work. Parties divide and are prone to corruption and change, they need competition to discipline them. Policies have to change and adapt with the shifting circumstance and complexities of government. Despite the ephemeral promises made during election campaigns, there is no perfect world here.
On my way into the polling booth I was thinking of Karl Popper’s words in The Open Society that the point of democracy is not that we can elect a better government and especially not great leaders (as they often do the people more harm than good), the point of democracy is we can change the government. We can change the conversation - and we did.
Christianity, with other religions, are an important part of that conversation in democratic Australia and if Israel Folau’s tweet was hurtful and poorly expressed, prone to oversimplification and implied heresy, it was also hurtful to many religious people and a poor expression of the resilience of our democratic sausage for our sporting bodies to literally remove him from the game.
Silencing people’s opinions is not the same thing as changing them and the shift of declaring non-violent, though contentious, views as incompatible with public expression is a disturbing curtailment of free debate that will eventually hurt all Australians.
As Christians we have the privilege to serve our time and place without condemning it while pointing to the hope of release from self-condemnation that is found in Jesus. As Australians we have the privilege of living in a free country where most ideas can be discussed and refined without fear of punishment from those who disagree. The fall out from Israel Folau’s tweet means we need grace from God to work out how to do both better.