Hallmark holidays often provide interesting theological moments, and yesterday was no exception. So many Happy Father's Day to the Heavenly Father messages on facebook and twitter that I had to wonder: Does God really give a shit about a Hallmark holiday? Is he offended if I don't make him a card? I mean, he's notoriously petty if you take the Tanakh seriously, but a crappy card? I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, and just write it off to the sappy sentimentality that seems to surround much of evangelical life. That, however, caused me to begin the process I've meant to work through since starting David Fitch's book The End of Evangelicalism? I fully intend, with your help, to document the empty signifiers most pervasive in the Church, and Heavenly Father led inexorably to the one that I think is the most egregious, Fitch's three excellent ones notwithstanding. I'd be tempted to rank it right there with Decision for Christ, but I want to put this one a little ahead.
I'm speaking of Relationship with Jesus (or variously, Christ, the Lord, Jesus Christ, my Lord, etc.), and I know many of my Christian friends will insist that this is not an empty signifier. To paraphrase Fitch, though, a master signifier (in this case an empty one) defies definition, needs to remain undefined, creates a parody of faith when defined too literally, gives the "troops" a rallying point, creates "others," and gives the faithful a sense of enjoyment based on their possession of it over against the others who lack it. I think Relationship with Jesus qualifies.
You're probably weary of hearing that I grew up Pentecostal, but we get new readers around here, and it's good to explain my context/filter. In Assembly of God churches in the 1970s (and probably still today) it was popular to define ourselves as people of a relationship over against people of a religion. You've heard the same sermon, minus the glossolalia and shitty hair, I'm sure. "It's not about a religion; it's about a relationship with Jesus." Or, possibly worse, "Christianity is the only faith in which God reaches down to us. In every other religion, men are trying to reach God." Etc., ad nauseam. Let's ignore that those pastors and Christians fail to understand a basic definition of religion, as that's a subject for a different time.
The pastors had to have illustrations for these sermons, and in Fitchian fashion, it's necessary to have an "other," that evil group who simply doesn't get it. For us, it was Catholics. Damn Papists. I can still remember the Sunday night prophecy series wherein the pastor used the symbols of Revelation to show us that the Roman Church was/is the Whore of Babylon. He, of course, missed the whole part about stoning the prophets, a clear reference to Jerusalem, but that didn't matter. An Assembly of God pastor could no more talk bad about the Jewish people than he could insult his wife's beehive hairdo; it simply wasn't done. It mattered little that they had no "relationship" with Jesus, having famously rejected him as messiah. What mattered was that there was a group of people who practiced an ancient religion that was close enough to our own to cause us concern. They believed in transubstantiation, confession, saints, Marian dogma, and all sorts of hideous heresies. Was the mass not a blasphemy in itself? That we would repeatedly subject Jesus to death over and over and then dine on his corpse? Hideous.
Anyway, until the Mormons rose to prominence, we always heard how the Catholics were the group that practiced religion, not relationship. We were left to glory in the fact that we had that relationship. How did we know? Well, it gets a little murky here. For Pentecostals, we could have evidence of the Spirit's work via glossolalia and the other extraordinary gifts, and that did provide some sense of identity, unless, of course, you couldn't shut down your brain long enough to engage in the silly nonsense syllables. At that point, you might just as well have, in Hester Prynne fashion, worn a scarlet U for unsaved when heading to the altar for the 914th time, hoping against hope that something would click.
I'll admit that for most evangelicals, this is not the issue, though, but please pity those poor rational kids held hostage in Pentecostal communities. For most, the issue of relationship is based on a series of "promises" in the Bible. It's always a "promise" unless it involves plagues, chastity, death, disease, poverty, justice, or forgiving others. By means of a bizarre method in which the young or new believer is convinced that "Jesus is always present with us," or some other variation of that idea, we are told that we have a relationship with Jesus. This is portrayed as a great thing. We are free from the law, free to receive grace, free from sin and death, and free to love and be loved by the Lord. Except that we haven't a fucking clue what a relationship with an invisible being with a barely (if at all) discernible voice looks like. And one who, we are told when circumstances don't go well, is God and can therefore do as he pleases. So much theology is written and spoken to explain God's absence, I was left finally to wonder if he wasn't simply absent all the time. And since he's done nothing to disabuse me of that notion, I'm still a happy skeptic. (I am open to the idea of God, as soon as whatever god is out there decides to make herself known at dinner here in Piedmont. There will be follow-up questions, though.)
As an evangelical, I too learned the vocabulary of relationship. Circumstances that went my way were attributed to god's ongoing presence in my life. Unanswered prayers were always dismissed with platitudes or text twisting. The excruciating practice of prayer was encouraged because we could hear god's voice, except we couldn't, and so we would make a million excuses when the voice we "heard" happened to be wrong or to change its mind six weeks later. We'd do everything except say, "I wanted to hear it so badly, I just said I heard something, but what I heard was just this thought in my head." Not much of that honesty in church. What is truly never defined are the terms of this relationship. Imagine a husband and wife trying to exist in this kind of non-communicative relationship with almost total absence, and those moments called "present" are so tenuous as to be attributable to any emotional twitch, nostalgic feeling, or cathartic expression. And to show that it is truly an empty signifier, think of the times you've heard people say, "I saw Jesus in my room," or, "I heard clearly and audibly the voice of God." Um, yeah, you think "full of shit," just like I do. Benny Hinn has followers, but they aren't people you take seriously.
Anway, this is just the first of the empty signifiers I've been thinking about. I know there are more; I just don't know how many are this important to the soteriology of Christianity.
