I feel in my heart, because God opened it up to me, if I stopped taking up serpents I would die and go to hell. It is in the Bible, and we tell people because it’s in the Bible you must believe it. – Jamie Coots, dead at age 41 from a venomous snake bite

He died Saturday night after refusing medical treatment from a rattlesnake’s deadly bite. Jamie Coots was a pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus’ Name in Middlesboro, Kentucky, a town near where I met my wife, Kelly, just a few miles away on the Tennessee side of the Cumberland Pass. It would be easy for anyone of us to condescend about Pastor Coots’ death, rolling our eyes and saying, “what an ignorant fool!” He may have been foolish, but he was true to his faith as he received it. Yet, his death has given license for people to make fun of him and his fellow travelers, and thereby also furthering a misunderstanding of what the Gospel of Jesus is all about.

So, I won’t make fun of him. I attended a snake-handling church once in the summer of 1979, north of Middlesboro in Leslie County Kentucky. Just in case you were wondering, I sat in the back of the church right next to the unlocked door (O me of little faith). It was a powerful experience and the people’s faith there was real. While I disagree profoundly with fellow disciples of Jesus like Pastor Coots, I don’t question their whole-hearted commitment to what they believe, nor their faith in God.

No, I won’t make fun of him, but I’ll certainly question his theological assumptions. As Pastor Coots said: “if I stop taking up serpents, I would die and go to hell.” Think about that statement: That’s just the same works righteousness snake oil the Church has been struggling against for centuries. There’s a clear path from Pastor Coots’ theology to the warped theology of the “prosperity gospel,” which says that if you just follow certain biblical principles and have enough faith, then God will shower you with wealth. Joel Osteen and Pastor Coots are just two sides of the same misguided, theological coin. Both hold that our particular actions can manipulate God’s decision about us in Christ.

The Gospel begins not with what we do, such has handling snakes, following biblical principles, or even trying to be a good person, but what God has done for humanity through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Gospel isn’t primarily about what we believe, but what God in Jesus did on our behalf. Our salvation is an unmerited, free gift from God bought and paid for by Jesus on the Cross. It isn’t a reward given for any particular behavior on our part that tries to influence or force a decision by God.

So, we should be careful when rolling our eyes at the likes of Pastor Coots. Many of us have our own version of snake-handling: Proving to God we’re better than other people, showing God how we’ve achieved success in life, or believing God must share our clearly correct political convictions. While we publicly acknowledge living by God’s grace alone, many of us in the Church live as if our lives are actually in our own hands; that God must give us our desired outcome based on our performance. We’re figuratively snake-handling our own self-righteousness. Pastor Coots just did it literally.

+Scott

 

“The idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’ commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective “Christian.” – Wendell Berry

I wholeheartedly agree with Berry’s assessment. We’re all guilty of the sin of baptizing what we say or do as “Christian” in order to underwrite what we see as righteous. We come by this sin honestly. We’ve been schooled in the celebration of the self all our lives. So, it makes sense we’d understand our point of view as righteous in contrast to those who understand things differently. After all, the great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” the great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, all of which insist on the self. Can there be any doubt that we’d see ourselves as righteous, while those who disagree with us are wrong?

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. The riots were fueled by a “not guilty” verdict for four police officers who, a year before, had nearly beaten to death one Rodney King. King became famous for asking during the riots: “Can we all get along?” We all saw the videotape. It was detestable behavior by the police, by my lights. But 20 years later, other people seeing the same videotape and recalling the same set of facts, arrive at a different conclusion. They conclude the police’s behavior was justified, even though they had compassion for Mr. King. How can this be? How can two groups view the same incident and set of facts and arrive at opposite conclusions?

Jonathan Haidt, in his new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, addresses this and related issues. Haidt, a professor of Moral Psychology at the University of Virginia, takes the reader “on a tour of human nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology.” One aspect of his research I found revelatory. When his researchers asked people about their moral foundations, they ranked their responses into five areas: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. They then asked the interviewees how they described their political or religious convictions: Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Very Conservative.

The results clarify the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Self-described liberals valued Care and Fairness more than the other three moral foundations. Self-described conservatives, however, endorsed all of the moral foundations about equally. These results show that people who disagree across a spectrum should be careful not to classify those who disagree with them as “immoral,” which often occurs in our culture wars. What may be happening is this: People are putting a higher value on certain moral beliefs than others. This helps explain why two people can reflect on what happened to Rodney King and arrive at a different moral conclusion. Rather than engaging in the current cultural blood sport of demonizing people who disagree with us, we might be able to go deeper into a conversation about moral foundations and recognize the other person’s deeply held, commendable, and good moral convictions.

+Scott