Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 7
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When I first started this series about Tony and Bart Campolo’s book, I figured I’d do a blog per chapter, but I’ve been going at a slower pace than that. The richness of the material requires it. I now need to do a third blog on Bart’s first contribution to the chapter, “How I Left.” What we have seen is that Bart, owing to various experiences, began to see his confidence in his Christian convictions erode. His friendships with some gay friends made him lose confidence in biblical authority, for example, which we’ve already discussed a bit. And similarly he rejected his belief in the doctrine of hell.
I suppose belief in hell isn’t exactly an essential Christian belief, in the sense that, presumably, Christians can be universalists. At least when it comes to human beings, then, they might think hell remains empty. What their view is of fallen angels, Satan, etc. would be another matter. But the point is that one doesn’t have to believe that anyone goes to hell in order to be a Christian. That said, though, traditionally most Christians have endorsed some doctrine of damnation, and there seem to be solid biblical reasons for doing so. So in this blog and the next I’d like to reflect a bit specifically on Bart’s reasons for rejecting the doctrine and why I do not find his reasons compelling, but rather confused.
Bart writes that while his commitment to Jesus’ teachings about loving relationships and social justice grew stronger, the content of his faith kept shrinking. The intensity of his commitment to effect good in the world was increasing, but his confidence in traditional Christian beliefs was lessening. This included the doctrine of hell, which was “long gone by then,” thanks, he says, “to Shonda and a host other Shondas we got to know.”
Shonda, recall, was the mother of one of the kids in the day camp he helped run in Camden, New Jersey. She had been raised a believer, but at the age of nine, tragically, she was gang raped by a group of young men. When she asked why God hadn’t rescued her, her Sunday school teacher explained that because God was all-knowing and all-powerful, he could have stopped the attack, which meant that he must have allowed it for a good reason. “The real question, the teacher when on, was what Shonda could learn from the experience that would enable her to better love and glorify God.” At which point Shonda said she rejected God forever.
What Bart admits was that his theology at this time wasn’t much different from that of Shonda’s Sunday school teacher. “Indeed, I believed that God was sovereign, and that anyone who didn’t accept Jesus in this life was going to hell afterward, which made God seem like the cruelest of tyrants, at least as far as Shonda was concerned.” It struck Bart as absurd that an all-powerful, all-loving God would willingly fail to protect an innocent little girl in this life, and then, when she couldn’t trust Jesus as a result, “doom her to eternal damnation in the life to come.” So absurd, in fact, that Bart decided to think otherwise.
Note that it wasn’t at this point Bart rejected faith altogether. Rather, he “instinctively and quietly adjusted” his theology to accommodate his reality. He decided that God wasn’t actually in control of everything that happened in this world after all, and then he decided that there must be “some kind of back door to heaven reserved for good people who didn’t manage to come to Jesus before they died.”
There are (at least) two important issues to discuss here: divine sovereignty and the doctrine of damnation. For the rest of this blog I intend to discuss the matter of divine sovereignty, and in the next blog the matter of hell.
I find it supremely telling that Bart’s adjustment to his theology regarding sovereignty was to choose to believe that “God wasn’t actually in control of everything that happened in this world after all.” This is a very important point, because it reveals that Bart’s operative conception of sovereignty was a conception that would arguably make God the author of sin. To believe that God is in utter control of everything that happens is the view of meticulous providence, but to my thinking there is little reason to believe any such thing, and a number of reasons to disbelieve it. All that happens is within God’s permissive will, surely, but to put God’s agency at the center of all that happens yields unpalatable results and goes beyond biblical teaching.
Once more, there are two questions regarding such a doctrine. Does the Bible teach it? And is the Bible reliable? I don’t think the Bible teaches it, and most Christians do not. When a group of men gang rapes a child, did God somehow cause that to happen? Surely not. Now, it’s true that some would affirm that God does cause such things to happen. John Piper has said as much, as has a certain stripe of other Calvinists. But I find such theology fundamentally mistaken, if not pernicious. And if it is mistaken, the question of whether the Bible is accurate in teaching such doctrine doesn’t even arise.
Here’s an interesting insight. Some have suggested that it was the liberal and progressive aspects of Bart’s upbringing that made him so susceptible to losing his faith. I doubt it. I’m rather inclined to think it was the ultra Calvinist-sounding nature of some of his convictions. And notice this by way of confirmation: Bart himself, when he adjusted his theology on sovereignty, admits in retrospect that this “was the beginning of the end for me.” He identified Christian theology with something like extreme Calvinism and meticulous providence, and when he rejected the latter, it put him on a road to reject the former and lose his faith altogether. What makes this as needless as it’s tragic, to my thinking, is if the original conflation of Christianity with meticulous providence was mistaken in the first place. It was.
Among the many problems with such theology, in my view, is that it renders the problem of evil intractable. Making God the ultimate author of sin and of the most heinous acts of cruelty and injustice and abuse is hardly consistent with God’s essential nature of love. Rather than conducing to finding a practicable solution to the problem of evil, it exacerbates the problem to the point of rendering it intractable. Rather than saying the possibility of such things tragically happening is introduced in a world in which God confers meaningful freedom that can be horribly abused, it makes us say silly things like God must have wanted the rape itself to happen for some reason. It’s both bad theology and bad philosophy.
So Bart’s mistake was not, I would submit, the rejection of meticulous providence, but his identification of such hideous theology with Christianity. If there are other accounts of divine sovereignty that don’t yield such unpalatable implications—accounts entirely consistent with sound principles of biblical interpretation—then it’s altogether rational and principled to reject something like meticulous providence. Indeed I think it’s rationally, ethically, and exegetically incumbent on us to do so. It’s no unprincipled theological accommodation; it’s doing good theology, refusing to treat as sacrosanct a rather obviously wrong interpretation that represents a minority view in the history of the church to begin with.
Bart admits to dialing down God’s sovereignty and dialing up His mercy. I don’t think he was wrong to do so, starting as he did with his warped and inhumane understanding of sovereignty. Sadly he is hardly the first to abandon faith because of a clear-eyed recognition of the morally distasteful implications of such hyper Calvinism.
In the next installment, we will take up the matter of damnation.
David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.
