Waiting for Gospel, by Douglas John Hall

Waiting for Gospel

Chapter 13

A Latter-Day Kierkegaardian Visits a Mega-church

Douglas John Hall saved his best critique for last!  As he recalls aloud his mega-church experience in various stages of confusion and repulsion, he invites us to reflect and respond in earnestness.  I shall simply quote his conclusion and invite us all to consider his departing questions:

“The point, however, is to ask what is being offered in these new temples (and our duller, less successful, and often nearly defunct churches)—not how it is packaged! What is it, and how does it stack up against the Bible, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Barth, Tillich, Ruether, Soelle—and (sic!) Kierkegaard. And others. Concretely speaking, in view of the four previous observations, I ask the following four questions:

“First, can Christians in North America today affirm and encourage the much beleaguered and belittled human individual without, in the process, implying that the lifestyle, together with the racial, sexual, economic and other assumptions and pursuits of persons shaped by our consumer society, is just what is ordered by the Master of the Universe?

“Second, how can Christian communities be hospitable without reducing faith to sentimentality, mystery to ordinariness, truth to slogan, hope to optimism, love to luv?

“Third, is it possible to perceive and present Jesus as the representative and revealer of true God without making of him all the God of God there is?

“Fourth, how shall we keep the cross at the center without turning God into a transcendent Shylock and relegating humankind and all the rest of creation to the status of a failed experiment?”