In an op-ed article a few years back, Zizek mentions the following story:
During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.” Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.
From the perspective of social change, Christianity — especially that in America — has largely lost its humanitarian mission to the world to show love. This isn’t to say that American Christians do not participate in mission work or give to humanitarian causes. However, Christianity has done so largely to ‘save lost souls’, or out of a fear of some kind of tormented Hell. The pockets of people that do humanitarian projects solely because of some profound ‘love’ or for humanitarian reasons happen to largely be nonreligious. Christianity has been succeeded by the post-Christian, secular world which has promoted ‘Christian’ values better than the Christians. To put this in a more provocative way: in order to love humanity because of divine love, one must be an atheist.
Yeah, that last sentence is provocative–just about as provocative as a bird-watching blog I read recently that said creationists cannot possibly appreciate birds as much as atheists! *eye roll*
There is plenty of humanitarian work going on by Christians. If you stop and think about it, that would NATURALLY also include trying to “save souls.” After all, that is what Christians do, among other things. It would be rather disingenuous to for a Christian organization to do humanitarian work without also offering the message that “Christ died for our sins.”
Preach it, brother.
thainamu, I don’t think you’re really replying to what I said. First, I did say that there are Christians doing humanitarian work. That, in itself, is not the issue. The real issue is that many Christian groups do humanitarian work with ulterior motives. The point of the ‘social Gospel’ is that if it is done out of love without an ulterior motive, then people would be willing to hear out the Gospel message. To paraphrase Karl Barth a bit, ‘the best theology would prove itself’. In other words, if people do humanitarian work for the purpose of proselytising, then it’s not really humanitarian work. It’s the difference between ‘our church is going to Mexico to build churches and evangelise’ and ‘our church is going to Mexico to help people’. They have they same end result, but very different motives. The problem with the evangelist motivation is that it rests on an assumption that God needs our help to ‘save souls’ — as if God couldn’t move among the people without a showing of the Jesus film, VBS, and daily tent worship services. I think God is bigger than that.