Bumper Sticker Spirituality - Excerpts from Chapter 3
An Excerpt from my book “Bumper Sticker Spirituality” - Chapter 3:
Where I live it is fairly common to see people driving around with various pithy doctrinal statements on their bumper stickers. You can pick yours from the long list of candidates: “Jesus Is My Co-Pilot” or the ubiquitous fish eating Darwin. Maybe this is just me, but aren’t these the rough equivalent of flipping someone the bird? My personal favorite is the one that goes something like “In Case of Rapture This Car Will Be On Auto-Pilot.” I wonder if we think about how that comes across to others: in the case of the Rapture my two-and-a-half tons of aluminum and sheet metal will be flying down the road at fifty-five miles an hour crashing into the nearest oncoming piece of traffic - maybe even that nice school bus load of innocent kids. But isn’t that the irony in the bumper sticker? Because if they were still around after the Rapture they wouldn’t be innocent now would they? They had their chance, you mister tailgater, you had your chance - you missed it, I didn’t, I’m right, and you’re damned. Enjoy eternity - I know I will.
Bumper Sticker Spirituality: Chapter 3 - What Spirituality Is Not
How many thousands, in this America, picture Christianity
as something old, sapless, joyless, mumbling in the chimney
corner and casting sour looks at the young people’s fun?
How many think of religion as the enemy of life and the flesh
and the pleasures of the flesh; a foe to all love and all
delight? How many unconsciously conceive of God as rather
like the famous lady who said, ‘Find out what the baby’s
doing and make him stop’?”
- Joy Davidman, Smoke On the Mountain
Religion demands converts. Spirituality creates disciples. The difference between the two is not slight. A disciple has what he needs to define his faith and sustain his soul within him as opposed to a convert who requires externals. A disciple is not self-contained, rather he is centered on a total reliance on God. A convert relies on externals to both sustain him, but many times unfortunately to do his thinking for him. The desire to fit within a particular group of people is an emotion we experience most profoundly and positively within our families. But for those who find their family experience short coming, the desire to embrace another group of people becomes increasingly strong. Too often, religion becomes a willing accomplice in providing a person searching for an identity with just that: an identity.
Just as religion is uncomfortable with tension, it is uncomfortable without physical reminders to strengthen the stamina of those who would otherwise falter. The history of religious icons has much to say about this phenomena. Where religion fears man will forget God, it creates symbols. Symbols become substituted for meaning. Meaning requires thinking, action and activity. Symbols are safe; they can be hid behind and yet they can also be fought over. They are simple enough to be broadly understood without complexity and yet they are powerful enough to bring men to bear arms against their brother.
The culture of faith in the twenty-first century has much riding on its symbols. Religion has created a whole new set of icons that can be used to identify believers. These icons have become a part of what defines who is a Christian: where we should be challenged to live by the life of Christ, we may now wear a T-Shirt with “WWJD” slathered over it prominently as a cheap substitute for meaningful changes in our lives. Our icons have become our identity; our Creator has been commercialized.
The extent to which we externalize something is the extent to which we do not understand its real value. Internalizing something, that process by which our minds are remade, is much more difficult and arduous. It rarely gets hung up on externals - rather, the process of remaking our minds involves dealing with difficult and deeply seated sins that separate us from a relationship with God and with others. One of my friends made the comment that when he first became a Christian he thought the big sins were drinking, drugs and having sex - he soon found out that these externals were the easiest things to remedy. I don’t mean to trivialize the struggles we all face with externals, but I empathize with him: my biggest struggles with sin are not the externals, but rather internal issues like truly forgiving someone who has wronged me, turning the other cheek to someone I think is petty and close-minded, or not loving others enough to sacrifice so they can be taken care of. For me, the biggest sin I struggle with is pride. I can’t seem to go much beyond fifteen minutes without forgetting that the universe does not revolve around me. I think the story of Lucifer rebelling in heaven has more in common with our every-day lives than any of us would ever care to admit. At times, I am so insightful and so interesting to be around I’m floored God ever let me grace this planet at all - frankly, I would have made a much better angel!
One of the problems with externals is that we all have a need for something to be a label when that something is not clearly understood. We rightly sense the value in the name of Jesus, but we don’t want to put the time, the effort, the energy into making His name more than an adornment. Making His name a model for our life is much more complex, it is much more profound, it requires humility, and - if we take the Bible at its face value - we have to admit that taking His name means getting dirty, not separating ourselves from our culture, and embracing those around us regardless of their spiritual, intellectual, or interpersonal maturity.
Assuming to Answer for God
Not too long ago, I saw on MSNBC a pastor getting interviewed about his newest ploy to fill pews: for their New Year Eve service they are going to give away a PT Cruiser and a Harley Davidson cycle. The MSNBC commentator, in an obvious tongue-in-cheek reference to the Christian metaphor WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) asked the pastor, “what would Jesus drive? A Harley? I kind of like that.”
“WWJD?” is a well-known acronym within the Christian world - it is at face value a really striking question worthy of serious thought. So much is at stake when we visibly place this message on our body or our car. We put WWJD on bumper stickers (after all, what good is a theology point that can’t be expressed on a bumper sticker?), on bracelets, on t-shirts, on Bible covers, on coffee mugs, cell phone covers and air fresheners.
WWJD has its roots in an important question and its desires are not bad. But what should have been a subtle point has become a pronounced theology. Let’s be honest, when environmentally conscious people want to poke fun at the Christian soccer-mom demographic, they turn to a marketing campaign that asks “What Would Jesus Drive?” Now, begging the reader’s patience, there is an inherent problem with this question: as we all know Jesus preferred boating to driving. Scripture is clear on this matter. When he needed to rest, he didn’t have the disciples take him on a long chariot ride in the scenic Nazarene country side - he had them take him on a boat ride. When he needed to get to the other side of the lake, he had a boat take him - he didn’t ride a chariot around to the other side.
If our theology is really Trinitarian, then we could easily change the ancronym WWJD to WWGD, substituting “Jesus” for “God.” Stop for a moment and let WWGD roll around in your head: What Would God Do? I would subject to you that only in a culture where we have lost sight of the power and majesty God has would we be so cavalier as to commercialize a WWJD label as predominantly as we have. It is at best cavalier, and at worst heretical. It is also, I would suggest to you, supremely self-righteous. What to you may be a question, a challenge you hope to live by, is to someone who does not share your viewpoint a dogma. For them, WWJD is a comment on the insight you have that they do not: the ability to supremely know right from wrong, meekness from hubris chastity from lust. We laugh at the Hasidic Jews who wear boxes on their foreheads because in Joshua it says to be sure that “his book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.” If we are going to laugh at the obvious legalism and senseless symbolism in the bound pieces of the law held to the foreheads of Jewish men, are we so far off in our own external symbolism?
Asking WWGD really ups the ante doesn’t it? It should also highlight the obvious fallacies that exist in the WWJD question. WWGD shows that externals can not substitute for real content. It also shows that we have trivialized our view of God. Perhaps most damaging, it shows that we commercialize and label what we should internalize and live by!
It was really comforting to me as a child to know that Jesus looked a lot like my Dad: there is only so much “truth” a six-year-old can retain in Sunday School Class. I don’t think I could have handled both the flannel graph Noah and the ark story line at the same time I was dealing with a Jesus that looked like Salmon Rushdie. The church I went to was quite comfortable projecting images of people drowning as they beat against the door of the ark (cannon fodder for an evening of bed wetting and night terrors for me). No doubt our teachers had to make a choice, either keep the drowning damnation flannel graph, or keep the Caucasian Jesus. They went for the obvious choice.
We should not feel completely bad about how we have honkified the image of Jesus - the impressionist painters of the 1500’s were guilty of the same thing. What our culture can take genuine credit for is the commercializing of Christ. Where our forbearers were content to codify the image of Christ to make Him look like them, we have packaged the image of Christ to fit our very commercial world-view.
Of all the things He is probably not happy about, the crass commercialization that surrounds His name, His image and His impact on His culture would be on the list. Where did we go so wrong to think that we could reach our culture by sending our kids out into their school systems with a WWJD bracelet, a cool t-shirt with a stylized crucifix, and a pack of folders sandwiched in a 3-ring binder slathered with stickers that say things like “Jesus saves … and so should you: sponsored by First Bank of Omaha”.
Our view of Jesus can be fairly easily surmised by how we treat Him in our culture. We clearly value Him, because you only commercialize that which you can market, and to market something, it has to resonate with the appropriate demographic. Jesus has become a marketing tool, a label, a way of saying “I’m a Christian, and you’re not.” It started out honestly enough - we encouraged new teenage converts to take their Bibles with them to every class, just to make the point that they were different now that they had Christ in their hearts. What started out as “a stand” has grown into a symbol, a label, a way of segregating “us” from “them.”
Was this how Christ was known to others? Was this how the disciples were known? Was it obvious to the Athenians that Paul was a Christian because he was lugging around II Chronicles (the KJV version of course) in two handy-dandy compact scrolls? I don’t think so.
It is interesting, perhaps even compelling, to go to a first century Christian source to see how they related the teachings of Jesus to their every day lives. Take The Epistle to Diognetus as one example. This Epistle was written, it is commonly believed, as a response to a non-believer’s question about what the essentials of Christian life involved. The fifth section says:
“Christians are not distinguished from the rest of mankind by either country, speech or customs; the fact is, they nowhere settle in cities of their own; they use no peculiar language; they cultivate to eccentric mode of life. Certainly, this creed of theirs is no discovery due to some fancy or speculation of inquisitive men; nor do they, as some do, champion a doctrine of human origin. Yet while they dwell in both Greek and non-Greek cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and conform to the customs of the country in dress, food and mode of life in general, the whole tenor of their way of living stamps it as worthy of admiration and admittedly extraordinary. They reside in their respective countries, but only as aliens. They take part in everything as citizens and put up with everything as foreigners.”
If I take that at face value, it strikes me what it does not say. More significantly, a historical perspective on when this was written is important. This was at a time when the church knew persecution, when it was forced to unite on the essentials and reinforce only that which mattered most. And in this time, they actually fit in, even participated with their culture! How stridently different than what today’s Western Christian culture accentuates. In our culture, we seek out not just adornments that label us as belonging to the Christian sub-culture, but we also employ a complex and pessimistic apocalyptic world-view in an effort to expedite the conflict between good and evil, less because we understand the ultimate redemption of man-kind and more because it will finally and ultimately prove us right. What would it mean to today’s Christian to recognize that Christ’s coming again has less to do with us being proved right, being vindicated in our faith and in our separation from our culture, but that His coming again has to do with the world being remade in the image with which He originally intended, in a world where all are equal and where beauty and love can be fully celebrated?
We all want a Jesus that we can understand. Our efforts to remake Him in an image we can connect to is understandable and not to be ostracized completely. Frankly, we all want a God we can understand - I know I do. I resonate deeply with the thoughts, questions, and doubts Philip Yancey so clearly articulates in his masterpiece Reaching for the Invisible God. My problem is not with those who want to connect to a Christ they can understand - He was, after all, willing to let Thomas put his fingers in His wounds to strengthen his faith - I have no doubt Jesus is willing to come to me to help me believe. What I do not believe in is a crass commercialization of Jesus that serves no other purpose than labeling my beliefs against someone else, rather than building those bridges I see Christ building so often in the Gospels.
The Secular View of Jesus
I have a dear friend who gave me my first insight into these WWJD bumper stickers, shirts and bracelets: he has elected not to put a WWJD bumper-sticker on his car out of a basic realization that his driving habits are perhaps against the subtle message his bumper-sticker is attempting to send out. What would Jesus do gets into a topic I am not sure we, as humans, can really comment very much on. Wasn’t he after all the Messiah? He was the God-Man. So let’s stop for just a moment - do we really hope to understand in each situation what Jesus would do? Quite frankly, I think the comment misses something on its conception and its execution. On its conception, we forget that Jesus had the right and frankly, the ultimate need, to always speak directly to the heart of someone and could do so with absolute freedom because he was God in the flesh and also because he knew exactly what was going on in their hearts. We don’t even know our own hearts, so how can we reasonably expect to know another’s so well that we can act on the basis of our insight into their very soul? Let’s be honest, this is not quite the admonishment we had once hoped for.
Who was Jesus really? What did he look like? How did he handle himself in normal situations? The Apostle John tells us that if all the stories about what Jesus did were written he supposed that “the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” What we do know of Jesus is what is recorded by his disciples - men who, when they took pen in hand no doubt recalled those momentous times when his deity, his full God-hood, was obvious and at work. Are you like me; do you wonder about what kind of boy Jesus was? What kind of teenage, coming-of-age issues he dealt with? Do you wonder about how he handled day-to-day living? What his normative experience was like, not just those select moments in time that have been freeze framed by the Apostles to maintain the primary events in Jesus’ life?
The prophet Isaiah gave the ancient Jews a detailed look at who their Messiah would be. Somewhere, this got lost in the translation to the ancient Jews, but I would suggest, it has also been lost on 21st century Christians. Isaiah tells us the Messiah would have “no beauty,” that he would have “no majesty to attract us to him,” and as if those two things are not pointed enough, Isaiah goes on to say that Christ would have “nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Isaiah tells us that he would be “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.”
Have you ever wondered if you would have recognized him as Messiah? It is convenient now, even comfortable, to fall back to historical arguments for the historicity of the risen Christ. While necessary, it overlooks the struggle of faith that the disciples themselves felt. I chuckle at times thinking of how today’s apologists so handily wrap up all of the reasons why Christ is a real person, why his teaching is infallible and why he is the God-Man. I wonder if the disciples would have, pre-Resurrection, had much in common with these same apologists. For us faith is convenient - it can be packaged and distributed as needed. For others, faith comes hard, it is fought for, it costs something.
The Jews in the days of Jesus Christ were primarily looking for a political leader, a man that would rise up and break the chains of Roman oppression from their backs. What they got instead was a meek “man” who felt that the Mosaic law was being improperly lived out and that fulfillment of Scripture would mean his death at the hands of his own people. I am so thankful that I live in the day and age I now live in, if for no other reason that I can now rely on the passage of time to prove the veracity of his claims to be the Messiah. I can be humble enough to realize that I may very well have been one of the faceless crowd shouting “crucify him.” After all, not only are prophets not appreciated in their home towns, but liberals who dine with sinners are all moral relativists.
Copyright 2004 - Benjamin A. Shobert
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“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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May 20th, 2004 at 4:10 am
I agree with you. I am personally sick of some of, what I could call, the cocky “Christians” out there. They should be more careful in what they say and do because others will judge them by the fact that they call themselves Christians. Many will go as far as judging the whole of Christianity based on just those few bad examples. Those bumper stickers for example, really can be percieved as flicking the bird or remarking “enjoy eternity, I know I will”.