With apologies to Tom Wolfe, there is a sad parallel of his societal commentary of the 1980s to the current deterioration of the Christian faith in the 2020s. It isn’t that there isn’t interest and passion in Christianity; it is that there are so many uneducated and ill-informed versions of Christianity being peddled that it is quickly losing any powerful and transformative meaning. When Christianity can be desecrated to mean any old damn thing then it essentially means nothing. Jesus wept.

Late last year I was having a conversation with a Lutheran colleague who buried his head in his hands and lamented, “I just wish Christ would return and put an end to all this unpleasantness. I don’t believe God wants us to be at one another’s throats all the time. I believe God wants unity. But unity isn’t going to happen until judgment day when all the sinners get sent to hell so the rest of us can begin building the Kingdom together.”

“And who are the sinners who get sent to hell and the ones that get to stay?” I asked.

We have had this ongoing disagreement for quite some time. My friend regularly says, “Satan’s greatest lie is that God’s love is unconditional.” My refrain is that “the limits of God’s love are not the limits human beings force on God. If God is love, then God is love, and those who don’t love, don’t love God.” We have fun conversations…

“Look. The Bible is crystal clear. The wages of sin is death. Sinners who choose to continue in their sin go to hell. Sinners that repent and cease to sin go to heaven.”

“And because I believe that God loves everyone, that I believe the same gospel that Jesus preached to the cultural diversity of the first century applies to the cultural and global diversity of the 21st century, that means what?” I ask. “Which contingent of sinners do I belong to? Hell or heaven?”

“You should know better,” he said. “You have no excuse. There is no place in heaven for false prophets.”

Whose Christianity is correct? Many people choose a binary faith of winners and losers, faithful and unfaithful, righteous and sinful. There is no doubt that Hebrew and Christian scripture can be cultivated for such a theology. It has an historic precedent, and in a worldly sphere that worships power, the God of ultimate power is very attractive. In a life of competition and constant challenge, it is very seductive to wish for worldly justice defined by payback, judgment, condemnation, and punishment for the “bad guys.” Jesus does make this all more difficult, but the beauty of a premodern, MIddle Eastern, non-intellectual, metaphorical, heavily translated and redacted writing being used to define our current reality means we can make it say just about anything we want it to.

I am currently preaching on the letters of John, and it is almost ridiculous trying to synthesize a coherent message from multiple commentaries. Those that rely heavily on linguistic, contextual, or historic factors are uniformly progressive and inclusive. Those that rely on filtering through a modern morality, English-translation-based, just listen to what the words say and mean today are uniformly conservative and binary. Reading most English translations, it is impossible to deny that these letters are in fact “either/or” masterpieces. There is every bit as much exclusion as inclusion. There is as much judgment as there is grace. There is a clear outside that helps define a Christian inside. Without historical context there are very limited ways to interpret these letters. But for basic, non-scholarly, non-critical filters, John’s letters raise more questions than answers. Without a bias going in, it is confusing to figure out what the author is really getting at. For me, studying the cultural context, the historical milieu, and the linguistic paradigm clear it all up. For those who are suspicious of the impact of intellectual rigor on Biblical interpretation, history, context, and language just make things muddier and feel like a progressive agenda to make the Bible say what they want it to.

Toss in Christian Nationalism, prosperity gospels, celebrity pastors, insipid praise music, the state of Christian publishing, the axes to grind of many academic approaches, the prostitution of the Biblical witness by politicians, and conspiracy groups not even reading the Bible or attending a church using God as a weapon, and you have a major conflagration – a bonfire, if you will – burning out of control and doing much more damage and lasting harm than good.

I responded to an email I received that had this phrase in it. I said something in a sermon that caused this person offense. She wrote, “I think Amerca is going to hell, not because we don’t love enough, but we love too much. Pansy fag (sic) liberals are killing us. It was fine when they left Christians alone, but now they are bringing Satan’s message into the church. You are feeding this blasphemy. You make God’s love and grace so cheap that it applies to everyone. Why even have a church if everyone is okay just like they are?”

I am not comfortable with the language this woman uses, but I don’t want to censor her perspective. As problematic and wrong as I believe her position to be, this was not the part of the email I found most distressing. This is how she closed her email. “Don’t bother responding to this. I won’t read it, and I won’t reply. I am not interested in hearing you defend yourself.”

How will we put out the fire that does so much damage if we cannot speak with one another? How will we grow beyond our limitations if all we do is launch indictments against each other with no court in which to adjudicate them? If our differences are no longer allowed to have two sides, then we are done for. And when any position calling itself “Christianity” refuses to engage the greater world, what good is it? To quote my critic, “Why even bother having a church if you don’t want to deal with other people?”

My title’s allusion is to Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Vanity was an excellent summation of the 1980s in the United States, and it is the vanities that are destroying the Christianities of the 21st century. We had better learn to talk to each other across our differences, and fast, or the bonfire of destruction is going to blaze out of control, and the gospel as we know it will not long exist.