Sanctification by Mockery
The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis
"Shame, Corin," said the King. "Never taunt a man save when he is stronger than you: then, as you please."
James 5:19-20
“My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”
The case of Lisa
At 17 years of age I loaded my gloriously orange corolla for the drive to the big city for uni. On the back seat were some spare clothes and a football, and the boot was filled with a no-nonsense biblical hermaneutic. I had been raised in a Dispensationalist Baptist church. The good Christians who raised me had some amazing strengths, the best of which was how seriously they took their Bibles. The Bible was the Word of God. What it said stood, regardless of how you felt about it. To be a Christian meant to read, believe and obey your Bible.
Despite my expectations I wasn’t raptured on the drive to my new home, an on campus residential college, so I unpacked my clothes, football and divinely translated King James Bible, and before long was making friends with whatever Christians I could find. There was Damon, a Godsent older man who I latched onto like a cobia on a whale shark, and Lisa, a Christian girl from a non-denominational background. I learned to make scones and lemon cake, and lured the others into a small Bible study. And so began my first real experience building relationships with other sorts of Christians.
One day we made the fateful decision to focus on gender roles for our Bible study. Now, I had met compromised Christians before, but I hadn’t met a compromised Christian who was weaker than me. Unfortunately Lisa was both compromised and weaker. She believed that the Bible was the Word of God, but had never had someone point out that this very Word of God actually meant what it said on the issue of woman preachers. Damon and I ran rings around her, brushing aside her nonsensical counterpoints, and naming some of her objections as the insubordination against God that they were. We did this all with a smile on our faces. The whole thing was quite a laugh.
Within two weeks Lisa was no longer a Christian. As she said, “If this is what Christianity teaches about women, I can’t agree with it.” The long and short is that a soul decided to take the road to Hell, and a grinning John held the sign at the cross roads.
Who bears the blame
Damon and I should have borne with our weaker sister by being straightforward but caring when we showed her her error. She was wrong, and this error probably would have ended in apostacy anyway, as gender compromise is normally the first step onto the slippery slide to liberal polytheism. It needed to be addressed, and unapologetically. There is no guarantee that a straighter approach would have saved Lisa, but it would have cleared us of any wrongdoing on judgement day.
The greater reprimand however belongs to every mature Christian who ever had a position of influence with Lisa when she was growing up. These Christians had let her worldview roam free outside the village, with never a warning of the dangers to be found in that country.
The question at hand
This blog post was inspired by a minor disagreement in my Bible study circle. Two jokers made some comments in a whatsapp group, comically bemoaning our mixing with Christians of a different, erroneous theological position at an impending event. Some other members privately admonished the jokesters to remember that, while their sentiments were perfectly correct, they must remember that there were others in the group that were less mature and may privately hold to this false position. All was said, and taken, in love. However, I think that these sensitive souls have things backwards.
The implied critique is that the jokesters may be doing to some members of the group chat what Damon and I did to Lisa. However, I would counter that the sensitive souls are playing the part of Lisa’s neglectful Christian community.
Sanctification by osmosis
People are not machines. We all say we know this, but without a strong dose of Lewis in our literary diet we are prone to revert to our post-industrial factory settings. For most people the way we come to believe things is strongly, almost totally, dominated by the beliefs of those around us. We are largely a product of raw worldview material from our parents, refined over time by peer groups and role models, with breaks of originality brought about by herculean feats of strength. Very little development happens by a formal, structured transfer of information.
The humour and sarcasm we are surrounded by is one of the keys to how we are formed. Every decently clothed joke has an element of the ridiculous, impossible or stupid in it. Each time someone laughs at one of these jokes they give their tacit assent that this was indeed ridiculous. Every time you don’t laugh at someone’s joke, you have found that you disagree with the comic on the nature of reality. If you are the only one in the circle not laughing, you have found that your view on reality is in the minority. Only our most precious views can long sustain an isolation of this kind, and in many cases we will conform without even knowing we disagreed in the first place. This often isn’t a bad thing. It is just one more way that we are shaped and moulded in the image of those around us. Choose good peers and you will find yourself well formed.
People of all stripes use humour and sarcasm to reinforce the bounds of reason. When a man jokes to his sons that fake anatomy covers fake personality, or a pastor notes that his toddler speaks like a Pentacostal, the hearers of the joke are actually sanctified as they laugh, as their worldview is brought into a greater alignment with God’s reality.
Humour is also an easy and fun way to break less mature Christians into more complex theology. Through humour they are introduced to the terminology and a caricatured outline of each position, as well as a helpful framing of what their starting point should be if they investigate further.
The pen to play in
There are clear boundaries for mockery, and depending on which boundary is crossed the taunt can become coarse or mean. We tend to agree on where the line of coarseness is, and we modern Christians are much more likely to be prudish than filthy in mockery. The boundary that we struggle with much more is that of meanness.
There are two rules to follow when using mockery in general conversation…
1. Don’t mock someone weaker than you.
2. Don’t mock an idea when you are really trying to mock the person who holds that idea.
Damon and I violated the first of these rules, which is why our mockery was wrong. However no such conclusion could be made of the two jokers in the group chat. Of course, this doesn’t mean that their humour was high quality, only that it was not mean.
In conclusion
The clearest opposition orthodox Christians face in today’s culture is over the nature of reality. More and more the flood of idiocy is rising around our churches and mature Christians must raise the sandbag walls ever higher to keep the madness out. One of the best ways to keep idiotic ideas out of the church is to name them for what they are, and this can be done just as validly by mockery as by a lecture with slides and diagrams. Meanness can and should be avoided, but some internal embarrassment can not be helped. If people believe something stupid, hear it called stupid, are embarrassed and repent, this is the Lord’s work and we should give thanks.
Christians who want to shield their weaker brethren from reality until their error can be cut out under anesthetic create the very problem they are worried about. By the time the operation is performed the tumour may be so far progressed that a technical surgery is really needed, and the teenage Dispensational Baptist surgeon may only have a hacksaw and duct tape on hand. If a younger Lisa had from time to time heard that “egalitarian preachers are women of either sex” or that ‘watching a woman preach is like watching a man breastfeed’ it is quite possible that she would still be a Christian to this day.
