Before I say anything else, let me say up front that I could not be happier that my Christian friends have someone like Jay Bakker speaking for the team. I reviewed Daniel Radosh's amazing Rapture Ready last summer, and didn't say much about Bakker's presence in the book. As a post-Christian, I managed to feel some relief that Radosh found someone sane to speak for Christians. That is no small task when writing a book about a movement that is anticipating an event like the Rapture. (It is Holy Week as I write, and on this Good Friday, I'm reminded of the Assembly of God church up the road from us that has a banner advertising their Easter sermon: Is this the Last Easter? The letters are all in black, a lovely Easter color.)
Bakker comes off as sane in Radosh's book, just as he does in his own recent book FALL TO GRACE. Unfortunately, the trend of subtitles continues with this book: A REVOLUTION OF GOD, SELF, AND SOCIETY. Yes, the caps are on the cover.
Excursus: Dear Publishers, enough with the damn subtitles. I am not 7, nor a dimwit. If you have to hold my hand to get me to read the book, your packaging sucks. If I am so idiotic that I can't figure out what the book is about, you're probably not targeting me. If you suspect that the people you are trying to reach are incapable of reading context clues or are deficient in their pop culture lexicon, perhaps target a new demographic. Whatever you choose, please stop with the subtitles.
The book was provided by Viral Bloggers, and I ordered it thinking it was more memoir than sermon. Alas, I was incorrect. That mistake is mine and has nothing to do with the quality of the book. Bakker does a good job of giving the reader a slice of his pain up front when he narrates in brief the events that led to the demise of PTL and the imprisonment of his father Jim Bakker. (He relates other vignettes throughout the book, but this is no memoir.) His is a story that those of us who grew up in church knew well and were exquisitely grateful was not our own. Bakker narrates the events to talk about a word. I used to think it was a good word; it had theological resonance. I have since changed my mind.
The title gives away the word, of course. Bakker talks about grace. The book is 80% theology and polemic, most of which is focused on the definition of grace, a Biblical justification for gracious theology, and the application of grace in certain real-life situations, most notably LGBT people and the Church. All this to say, it's kind of like what Philip Yancey and Tony Campolo have been doing for years, only with tattoos and piercings and a more horrifying story.
Like Radosh, I am more comfortable with the Jay Bakkers of evangelicaldom, but I sense a fundamental level of dishonesty in their application of Scripture. It is theology as wish fulfillment. Begin with an image of God you prefer, and then interpret freely around the difficult passages of Scripture. Insist words like grace and love be defined in the broadest terms possible, but be careful never to critique the consequences of both words being synonyms for acceptance or tolerance. Grace has become the most vacuous of Christian words, because it essentially means God loves me no matter what, but it begins with the assumption that he had reason to be pissed at me to begin with. He created a world in which I had to fail, and then got pissed when I did. Then he killed himself to forgive me. And now I can stop feeling bad if I'll just accept the reality of his self-sacrifice. What if I don't buy the first premise? Or the second? What if I don't feel bad about offending a thing called God? What if I'm more concerned about offending friends, family, neighbors, etc.? What if grace should only be applied to my life by flesh and blood creatures with whom I should actually try to get along, not from whom I should demand forgiveness and grace? What if we all agree that we're marginally to completely fucked up and then work out a way to live side by side?
This is easy for an outsider to say because I have scrapped the whole project. In the end, I stumbled on the authority of Scripture. I decided it had none. I actually decided that long ago, but the full import took a few years to arrive. Mr. Bakker has done the same thing, as have most who insist the Bible looks favorably upon things like LGBT issues and gender equality. Far easier to admit that its Bronze Age attitudes are related not to interpretational difficulty, but to it having been compiled in the Bronze Age. The whole bloody story (not British bloody, Passion of the Christ bloody) reflects an ethos and a cosmology that, had we not been raised in it, would seem utterly bizarre. Far easier to walk away than to make it make sense. If you want to believe God loves everyone no matter what, fine. I like that version of non-toxic theism better, but it isn't the one the Bible teaches, not if words are to have any meaning at all. Love equals hell as a possibility, and grace means god loves me and accepts me even though I screwed up in a system he created in which I had to screw up. You cannot make this stuff up, folks. Oh, wait...
