A Theology of Religious Change

What the Social Science of Conversion Means for the Gospel

Zehnder

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781630879228
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A Theology of Religious Change asks a simple question with a complicated answer: Why do people change religious faiths? The study invites its readers on a trek through sociological and psychological literature that suggests many causes of religious change. Moving beyond a mere catalogue of motives for conversion, the author explores how a theological account of conversion and the doctrine of election can be broadened, strengthened, and reformulated in light of the complexity of faith's human side. This book seeks to guide pastors, church workers, and theologians in their task of communicating the message of good news effectively by drawing attention to the diverse factors influencing religious change.

1

The Gospel as the Criterion of Religious Change

As stated in the introduction, the correlational method for relating science and theology has no built in direction unless someone defines it independently. The psychosocial accounts of religious change that follow this chapter will be confusing to filter and use unless we have a definite theological concept of conversion intended to address these cases. This chapter provides this definition by arguing that the gospel’s presence in people’s faith is the one thing that makes religious changes theologically significant. The gospel is thus the criterion of salvation, or that which identifies Christ’s presence amid any variety of religious experiences.

Conversion’s Spiritual Dimension

That salvation comes through the Holy Spirit there can be no doubt. There is also no doubt that human beings are unable, by their thoughts and actions, to tame, control, or direct this transcendent source of faith that takes a budding development in religious preference and illuminates it with Christ. The vitality of church ministry hangs on this one point: that, contrary to reason, Christian life begins with recognition of human helplessness before God.1 Though an uncomplicated truth, what the church teaches children about their spiritual dependency on their heavenly Father and the necessity of his forgiveness is perhaps the most difficult theological truth to believe, being difficult on a qualitatively different level from daily operations of human thought because, as St. Paul testifies, it is only understood as a consequence of the Spirit’s miraculous intervention.2 It should not be surprising, then, that scientific research into religious change is wholly unable to understand the transcendence that it continually dances around but never finds. Rationality neither finds nor espouses this human dependence on grace because of its very orientation as an active pursuit of knowledge and conquering of nature. Like a jungle explorer caught in quicksand, its struggles only embed it deeper, and by its own presuppositions it cannot see that to find a solution it must first be still. Grace, that is, cannot be caught through active strivings or scientific method. Ironically, it must catch.

The church confesses its dependence on grace not to efface the human being and thereby deny conversion’s observable side; it confesses grace to acknowledge the ultimate meaning of a process that science can conceptualize on its own level but cannot value. The wealth of insight that social science provides into how individuals change religiously, affiliate with faith networks, suffer worldview breakdowns, and search for new meaning systems still never harnesses the significance of these processes or finds what theology calls “salvation.” That task—which begins in acknowledging human dependence on grace—belongs to theology alone and is invisible to rational structures.3 Though a conversion theology may use science to explain how the gospel speaks to people amid life’s changes, the starting point must be a theological account of conversion that preserves its independent authority.

Conflict in Human Nature

Salvation is meaningful only amid an absolute quandary, something irresolvable by human methods. As Paul says: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”4 This biblical maxim does not imply that humans tend to fall short such that they can, through trial and error, correct their aim and fall perfectly on God’s glory. In its own way, that presupposition characterizes contemporary science. It means rather that humans have a fundamental conflict with God in their nature, what theology calls “Original Sin” or “depravity.” Though human nature is good in its created essence, its fallenness blinds it to spiritual things. Though humans are created as responsible moral agents,5 their capacity to choose moral good is limited to mundane things, or “matters below us.”6 These matters include civil affairs such as social ethics and things (including science) that reason is intended to govern, but it excludes the ability to change one’s heart. Spiritually speaking, the human will is not the neutral choosing apparatus that it might seem to be. Its inherent choosing capacity cannot apply to impossibilities (i.e., choosing to love God). In spiritual matters the will is an inner orientation, a state of heart that, left to its own ability, will always orient away from God as though sin were north and God were south on a spiritual compass.

The depravity doctrine does not explain every problem of humanity directly, nor does it encourage the church to delight when scientific arrogance is leveled, where illnesses go uncured or space shuttles explode mid-flight. It rather expresses the fallenness of all affairs because of their distance from God, not that humans are incapable of great things, but they are incapable of achieving God’s righteousness in their accomplishments. Humanity’s fall means that we narrow our vision to the horizon of human potential (incurvatus in se) but fail to understand the futility of the greatest human goods if their grandeur lacks divine blessing.7 It might seem that human claims to self-sufficiency would arise exponentially in a modern age where feats in technology (even the computers we take for granted) would appear miraculous only a few generations ago, but the human claim to self-sufficiency, as it forms an ultimate horizon of expectation and meaning, has persisted from the earliest times. Humankind continues to reach at God from towers of Babel,8 and when people discover that God cannot be reached through rational abilities, they do not, on their own understanding, retreat from their pursuits but will manufacture idols, redefining God in domesticated forms unlike the transcendent creator and redeemer. Science will even tempt us to conclude that to discover God and to discover mental health and peace in oneself are not particularly different things.9

The Bible’s prophecy to all generations is that human strivings to self-salvation are impossible because they operate on a basis that is doomed to fail. “The wages of sin,” Paul says, “is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.”10 Without beginning and ending in this fundamental place between death and life, sin and redemption, the Scriptures declare that any human efforts to build cultures and businesses, to seek moral rectitude, or even to convert to true religious faith cannot bring about salvation because humans cannot escape their natural fallenness. The problem that plagues conversion theology lies here: that the heart of humankind is corrupt and standing in need of faith.11

On Acquiring Faith

But how is faith obtained? Church doctrine will typically state that the Spirit inspires faith through the word and sacraments.12 This rule confirms faith’s normative source, that it cannot come without the word; but it does not attempt to detail God’s action or how people develop religiously. Its best function is to say how faith is recognized through the word. In addition, the Scriptures communicate that however mysteriously God works on people through his word, Christ is the way to God, unlike humanly conceived solutions.13 Protestant theologies have emphasized justification, that God’s saving gift of Christ is complete in the instant that God gives it. Christ cannot be accumulated through moral efforts because, like Babel towers, these strivings are human measures to tame an untamable Spirit. Justification couples with “divine monergism” to communicate the human state of inability before God’s mercy and to curb the inherent impulse to seek God’s approval in good deeds. “Monergism” is simply the acknowledgment that humanity, due to its fallen condition, is unable to cause the Spirit to illuminate itself with Christ, that there is no leverage humans have over God’s grace.14 It contrasts historically with synergism, which posits salvation as a result of God’s grace and human decision for that grace, however little. History exposed a problem with synergism; that if salvation were made contingent on a choice, then no matter the degree to which the church emphasized grace, salvation would not be certain. Salvation’s comfort for synergism would have to anchor in a personal sense of achieving right belief regardless of the church’s assurance. It dramatically changes the paradigm of salvation’s certainty, however subtly, by placing final emphasis on the individual rather than on God. As much as the pastor should say with Jesus: “Your sins are forgiven,”15 the church could believe this message not because of its reality but because of its confidence that it has believed the pronouncement rightly. And to leave justification contingent on human subjectivity is to leave room for doubt that maybe my faith is not solid enough or maybe I do not understand doctrine sufficiently to be saved.

The tension between monergism and synergism arises because there are divine and human sides to salvation, and no broad consensus has appeared across denominational lines to demonstrate how they work together. Certainly right human belief is necessary for salvation. Individuals cannot spurn God’s grace and obtain grace simultaneously, but can belief (or any religious experience) be a kind of meritorious ground for salvation? Thus the problem turns, and the theologian is forced to decide which emphasis best represents the picture of salvation that God has revealed. Though it can prove neither its choice of authoritative sources nor its interpretations to satisfy all objections, this book favors a Christ-centered approach to this problem—one that emphasizes the gospel’s character as a pure gift—meaning that faith must originate from Christ, outside of t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Gospel as the Criterion of Religious Change
• Chapter 2: Change in Religious Experience
• Chapter 3: Transformation of the Individual
• Chapter 4: The Individual and Parental Influences
• Chapter 5: The Lure of Ideology
• Chapter 6: The Web of Social Ties
• Chapter 7: Conversion and the Divine Choice
• Bibliography