The following should be read less
as an attack on Christianity than as a defense of prax-based religions. Much of
what I say could be used by Muslims or even Catholics. It should be taken as a
given that those better read in the intricacies of Christian theology should
feel free to correct my explanations of how different Christians understand justification.
One of the big surprises for me, when I began to seriously study Christianity, was the discovery that Christianity is actually a much more
difficult and demanding religion than Judaism. Obviously, it is very easy to be
a casual Christian. It is not a challenge to go to church for an hour a week
and mumble platitudes about loving your neighbor. The picture changes once we
start dealing with committed Christians. Catholicism does place serious demands
upon the minority of its practitioners who take the Church's teachings as
obligatory as opposed to mere suggestions. Where things get really interesting
is when you turn to various branches of Protestantism, which is premised on the
rejection of any demand for works and instead relies on faith. (The Arminian
tradition can be seen as an attempt to smuggle works back into Protestantism.)
Eliminating works for faith does not make it easy to be an
intellectually serious Protestant. On the contrary, not being able to point to
ritual practices to demonstrate that you are a good Christian means that you
are completely reliant on your ability to gain the precisely correct frame of
mind in order to be saved. It seems simple to claim that all you need is to
have faith. The problem is that faith, within Protestantism, does not only mean that you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and part of the Trinity.
Having faith means that you believe that Jesus dying on the cross and nothing
else is the only way you are saved. You cannot even believe that your good
deeds play a role in salvation. Jesus is not going to say: that person performed
a few meritorious actions and so I will save him as opposed to the really bad
people in the world like the thieves crucified next to me. Everyone is
completely depraved and unable to perform even the smallest act of
righteousness by themselves.
This sets up Martin Luther's contrast between faith and works. If
you are going to believe that doing the right actions can save you, there is no
end. No matter how much a person minimizes their pleasure, there is always a
more extreme form of asceticism. What is really devious about this is that the
more one practices asceticism the less one is thinking about God. The logical
end of asceticism is for a person to turn themselves into an idol. Can you
believe how righteous I am? For Luther, faith and works contradict each other.
If you believe in works, even a little bit, then you do not have genuine
faith.
Keep in mind that Luther started off as a highly ascetic Augustinian friar before he left Catholicism for marriage, kids, and beer. More important than
possibly nailing 95 theses to a church door was Luther's spiritual crisis as a friar. Did being a friar really save him? Did the fact that he had doubts about whether
he was saved prove that he did not really believe and was therefore not saved?
The human mind has a particular talent for turning in on itself. Do I really
love God or am I just using him to get into heaven? Am I subconsciously trying
to convince myself that I love God because I know that I could never fool God
into believing that I am sincere? Luther may offer an effective counter to asceticism
by eliminating works from the process of salvation but he only makes the
problem of internal mind games worse.
Luther's position is only going to drive believers into moderate
levels of insanity. According to Luther, faith in Jesus requires that you hold
two conflicting beliefs at the same time. You must believe that you really are
a totally depraved sinner incapable of doing any good deed and, at the same
time, that it does not matter because Jesus is willing to save you as long as
you have faith. You must simultaneously feel guilty for your sins and serenity for your salvation. Of course, how does a person stop himself from thinking, even
subconsciously, that if Jesus is so willing to save him perhaps his sins are
not so terrible and he can be saved through his own merits? On the other hand,
if his sins really are so terrible, perhaps Jesus will not save him unless he
earns his forgiveness with good deeds. If you ever step out of this Lutheran
box, you lose your salvation and need to start over. The terrifying reality for
Lutheranism is that even if you are saved now, you can lose everything in a few
minutes with just the wrong thought. Lutheran religious practice is an ongoing
exercise of using humility to constantly get back to that proper balance
necessary for salvation and hope that you die at the right moment before you
lose your faith again.
All of this makes Calvinism look downright healthy by comparison.
If you are willing to accept supralapsarian double predestination that God
decided before creation who was going to be saved and who was going to be
damned, the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints logically follows. This
means that, if you are one of the lucky few elect, you cannot possibly lose
your salvation and, therefore, do not have to worry. If you are not one of the
elect, you also do not need to worry because it will not help. God decided even
before you had a chance to sin to send you to Hell for all eternity.
I have recently learned how to descend to new levels of insanity
with Protestantism. In his work Fear of God, John Bunyan (of Pilgrim's Progress
fame) argues for the existence of two kinds of "ungodly fear of God."
The first is that one believes that he is such a terrible sinner that Jesus
would never agree to save him. In this, Bunyan's choice of emphasis differs
from Luther's. With Luther, the primary concern is that a person might believe
that they are righteous enough that they do not really need Jesus. It is
probably not a coincidence that Luther started off as a friar while Bunyan
started off as a lay Christian who liked to have a good time on Sunday.
So far so good. Bunyan's second kind of ungodly fear, though, is
that, once you have accepted Jesus and have been saved, you might go back and
question if your conversion was sincere and really valid. According to Bunyan,
before a person is saved, he certainly needs to believe that he is not saved
but after being saved one is not allowed to doubt their salvation. To do so
commits the ultimate Protestant crime of not having faith.
Imagine Bunyan's Christian. He realizes that he is a terrible
sinner, who needs to accept Jesus as his savior. Christian prays to Jesus to
save him, acknowledging that he has no other means of salvation, not even a
lifetime of good deeds. Christian realizes that he is saved and rejoices in
this knowledge. Five minutes later, though, Christian begins to think to
himself: did I really accept Jesus as my only possible savior or, miserable
sinner that I am, simply pretend to accept him?
If Christian was not sincere the first time then he is obligated
to question his salvation as he is not yet saved. But if he was sincere the
first time, he is not allowed to question his salvation and, by doing so, has
thrown himself back into the category of being unsaved. This would mean that
Christian needs to accept Jesus a third time unless he was right the second
time that this first time was not sincere. Clearly, a doctrine designed to stop
people from obsessing too much about whether or not they are saved actually
makes the problem even worse.
From this perspective, Judaism is remarkably reasonable in that it
avoids this agonizing over whether one is saved with the inevitable question of
"Are you really truly saved?" Judaism can do this precisely because
it embraces a doctrine of works wholeheartedly. Judaism does not ask "Are
you saved?" Instead, Judaism asks what mitzvah can you do right now. It
does not matter if you are righteous or wicked; there are always mitzvot to be
performed. From this perspective, asking whether or not you are saved is a
question that one has no business asking. It has nothing to do with fulfilling
your purpose in this world so it wastes time better spent doing mitzvot. Since
Protestantism does not have an endless stream of mitzvot to perform every
minute of the day, committed Protestants have no choice but to spend their time
thinking about their salvation until they drive themselves up a wall going in
circles wondering if they really have faith.
Belief is still important to Judaism but you come to faith by
performing mitzvot. They teach you what to believe and grace you with the
ability to persevere in your belief. Furthermore, the very nature of mitzvot
precludes radical asceticism. For example, you are obligated to eat a good meal
on Shabbat and are not allowed to fast. You must get married and have children.
You are not allowed to practice celibacy. You are not allowed to give more than
20% of your wealth to charity so apostolic poverty is forbidden. Anyone who
says otherwise is a heretic and can be ignored
It is Judaism's emphasis on ritual as opposed to theology that
allows it to avoid the pitfalls that will send Christians, if they take their
religion seriously, into either the insanities of asceticism or of trying to
think their way to salvation. Jewish practice both protects it from trying to
earn salvation through asceticism or from trying to simply gain the right beliefs
ungrounded in deeds. As much as I find Chabad's theology objectionable, they do
get one thing right. They do not care what kind of Jew you are. However
religious or not religious you are Chabad will tell you that Hashem loves you
so why not thank him by doing a mitzvah right now?
