Terrorisation preaching

preachingOn many occasions in my life I have listened to the archetypal Christian sermon. I call it archetypal because it is the sermon/testimony that I have heard in a variety of settings and contexts up and down the country in a variety of conservative churches. The sermon will begin with a description of the way society and morality has gone to the dogs. Human beings have surrendered their morals and politics to the ‘spirit of the age’, which is sometimes revealed to be no less than Satan himself. The particular sin that today causes the most outrage is the practice and tolerance of homosexuality. This particular sin is so heinous that I have never heard any preacher admit to practising it himself, even if the rest of his unredeemed pre-Christian life was fairly murky. From his past, the preacher may admit to other gross sins, drink, bad language and different forms of lust. In making these experiences part of his testimony, the sermon will have this ‘before and after’ narrative. Before his moment of conversion, life was, for the preacher, a time of depravity and wanton behaviour. That was a pathway which leads straight to Hell. Even though the preacher has now moved beyond any thraldom to depravity, he will describe it with great relish, giving the hearers the impression that sin was, in fact, rather fun. The narrative will be punctuated with dramatic pauses to emphasise the horrors of hell that had been awaiting him if he had not left his unredeemed state. The middle part of the sermon/testimony moves on to the moment of conversion and how the depraved life was turned around by a statement of trust in Jesus and the uttering of the ‘sinner’s prayer’. Now that this moment of new life had arrived, he could look forward to the joys of eternal life in heaven. The whole purpose of Jesus’ life, birth and death was, seemingly, to provide a way out of the terrors of hell for those who make this particular commitment to him. This will include openly expressing their faith in his substitutionary death on the cross. Through this sermon/testimony, a message of hope is being offered, but the offer has the implication that a refusal to accept it is to invite a future eternity of pain and despair in the never-ending punishment of hell.

My account of the ‘archetypal’ evangelical sermon may have some elements of caricature but it is still close enough to the reality for my readers to recognise it from their own experience. It is in fact based on the mediaeval/Reformation model that understands that the point of Christianity is to provide the means for an individual to escape the horrors of hell. It is not an exaggeration to draw attention to the way that medieval Catholic piety was obsessively focused on presenting the sacraments and observance as being about avoiding hell and the uncertainties of purgatory. The Reformation itself was initially brought about by the protest of Martin Luther over the way that indulgences were openly sold to lessen the time to be spent in purgatory. In many English parish churches are chantry chapels, built for the purpose of offering masses for the souls of the benefactors. Priests were employed to do little else but offer these masses. Much, if not all, pastoral work was centred on preparing people for death, so their souls were fit to be received by God.

The mediaeval obsession with the eternal state of a man’s soul passed straight through to the Reformers but the proffered answers to this quest for eternal safety were to be entirely different. No longer was the believer to focus on sacraments and indulgences but on the pure word of God and the possibility that faith in Christ and his atoning death would release the soul from the horrors of hell. This binary world of heaven and hell still filled the imaginations of Christian men and women right up to the present. To be saved was to be able to be free from these terrors. Ordinary Christians, captivated by their own terror of this fate, were prepared to do anything, say anything, to receive some reassurance that they would not enter hell at the moment of death.

I am surely not the only person who has noticed that much traditional Christian teaching, especially when it has been presented to ordinary people, has been concerned with teaching how a individual can avoid hell. In practice this has meant that much preaching, whether Catholic or Protestant, has been openly using the weapons of fear and terrorisation. What has been heard by many has been this: ‘Unless you do and say these things, you cannot expect any place of safety (salvation) when you die.’ Such a stark message is still heard in many churches today. It goes without saying that such a threatening message, when internalised, creates enormous fear. I need at this point to remind my readers that this is not the message of Jesus as recorded in Scripture. Most of this mediaeval/Calvinist version of the Christian faith is lifted straight out of legalist passages ascribed to Paul, while we find little support for any heaven/hell obsession in the words of Jesus himself. If we take the heart of the teaching of Jesus as being about the ‘Kingdom’, we see that his concerns were about transformation of human beings and society. His followers are called to live in a different way, not in order to escape hell, but in order to change themselves from within. The way of preaching at people using power and terror tactics was one of the temptations clearly rejected by Jesus in the desert. He was offered the possibility of using political power to enforce obedience through terror tactics, but he chose not to. Instead the method of Jesus was to make an invitation, open listeners up to a new vision of what God was like and see what the way of love might lead to. In the Beatitudes Jesus speaks of a way of living which turns conventional values upside down. His is a way of humility, surrender of power and finding God in each other, but especially the weakest, the children and the people who are despised by the world. The proclamation of the Resurrection, for me, is the statement that, at a very simple level, if you live like Jesus, following his path of love and in a refusal to manipulate and control people, God himself will be with you for ever.

It is ironic that two great systems of presenting the Christian faith, the Catholic and Protestant, seem to have had so little regard for the words and message of Jesus himself. Obviously I have had to drastically summarise what he seems to have been about, but it is clear that he very little to say about people going to hell if they did not conform to a particular series of actions and beliefs. He also had absolutely nothing to say about homosexuality that preoccupies so many Christians today and for some has become the touchstone of orthodoxy. It is as if large numbers of Christians read a different Bible, one that records only the obsessions of the mediaeval and Reformation period. That is not the Bible I read, or indeed the one that reflects what I understand Jesus came to present to us. If I read the Bible to discover what Jesus was really about, then I read a Bible that teaches nothing about control, has no interest in terror and uses nothing in the way of threatening language. Scripture, as taught by Jesus, invites us to a new experience of life, life in all its fullness.

About Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a retired Anglican priest living at present in Cumbria. He has taken a special interest in the issues around health and healing in the Church but also when the Church is a place of harm and abuse. He has published books on both these issues and is at present particularly interested in understanding how power works at every level in the Church. He is always interested in making contact with others who are concerned with these issues.

4 thoughts on “Terrorisation preaching

  1. No you’re right. For all the gory details preachers will own up to in the pulpit, gay sex isn’t one I have ever heard. Could it be that becoming a Christian doesn’t actually “cure” you of being gay? Horrrors!! The listing with relish of the various things people used to do in their former depraved lives is straight out of Paul. Followed by “such were some of you”! Great fun. There was a Zoology lecturer where I went to Uni who was reputed to shout “Sex” whenever he thought somebody was falling asleep. This in a era when a mention of “the machines in the toilets” (condom machines, but never said) was enough to render a committee meeting silent with embarrassment for easily long enough to get a measure or two passed! I assume the listing of such sins worked for Paul to get everyone’s attention, but I agree with you, it’s unlikely to do the job today. Frightening people into the kingdom surely never worked, but it probably did produce the bums on pews. Nowadays, it just makes the unchurched think we’re all nasty, as well as nuts! Take comfort, Stephen. Many people probably think the archetypal Christian sermon is Alan Bennet’s “And Esau was an hairy man”! I’ve mentioned this before, but who was it said you have to hold what you think up against things like common sense and tradition to test it? And you have to hold it up against love.

  2. Thanks, I’m very much in tune with your view of Jesus. personally I haven’t really experienced terror preaching, ever. I think it has fallen out of fashion in some parts of the church. But it’s practicing what you preach too, isn’t it. I’m reminded of someone who was told that Christianity has been tried and found too difficult. He replied that it had been found too difficult and not tried. That does of course apply to large parts of the church.

  3. There are mountains of problems here. This type of preaching is something that appears to be relatively new (Having its roots in the 15th century?)
    However, the problem with something that is evidence led is quite simply, ‘Who’ is reading that ‘Evidence’?
    I would say that the ‘Terror preachers’ that I encountered were very selective in relation to where their ‘Evidence’ came from?

    They would hold up the bible (Like the man in the picture on Stephens blog) and say “From this, The Word Of God!” Well was it?

    I think enough evidence has been brought to this blog to prove to any fair reader, that the bible can, (And is!) used to defend anything from the subjugation of women, to the ‘Justice’ of the death penalty.
    When I was a card carrying fundamentalist evangelical, I would put my make up on every day and ‘get ready for the show.’ * Part of that make up was having a large bible tucked under my arm, this of course was better than any stage props because, it brought an absolutism with it that stopped any hope of asking the question ‘Why’?

    This type of ‘Preaching’ has turned many away (Including by brother Nick). Even when someone comes to the conclusion that we live in a meaningful universe, his or her view of the God of the bible can become utterly confused. I feel very sorry for the former atheist Antony Flew who can’t make up his mind whether God is ‘Good or Bad’

    * Desolation Row. Bob Dylan

  4. My comments above were ill worded, I was referring to the “Mountains of problems” caused by these preachers, not anything Stephen said.
    Just wanted to make that clear.

    Chris

Comments are closed.