But What If the Bible Doesn’t Say That?

Adam Hamilton, Half Truths: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves and Other Things the Bible Doesn't Say

We mainline Christians certainly love our platitudes. No matter what curveballs life throws, we inevitably have a ready-made cliché available. The problem is, we frequently think our preferred platitudes come from the Bible, which they most certainly don’t. Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor from suburban Kansas City, collects five beloved platitudes which he believes impede Christians’ most direct experience of God, and God’s love.

Reverend Hamilton identifies the following five shopworn cliches, including several variations on their themes:

• “Everything Happens for a Reason”
• “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves”
• “God Won’t Give You More Than You Can Handle”
• “God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It”
• “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin”

These common expressions provide handy, nugget-sized servings of Christian layperson theology, which believers can deploy in nearly all circumstances. Each one, Reverend Hamilton admits, contains some amount of truth. As canned responses to life’s ever-changing happenstance, they’re broadly unsatisfying. Sometimes, things happen because they happen; or God’s word exists in context and doesn’t apply here; or we get so busy hating sins that we forget to love our neighbors.

Worse still, in Hamilton’s estimation: entirely too many Christians believe these bromides come from the Bible. He cites a Barna Group survey suggesting that as many as eight in ten Christians believe “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves” is biblical, which it isn’t. (I have a love-hate relationship with Barna research, but let’s accept it provisionally.) These clichés first substitute Man’s wisdom for God’s guidance, then elide the wisdom, leaving only cold comfort.

For instance, when telling hurting people that “God Won’t Give You More Than You Can Handle,” we attribute everything that happens to God’s will. That’s pretty horrific, if you consider what catastrophes ordinary people face daily. Reverend Hamilton directly disparages Calvinist predestination, with its presumption that God planned everything you face before Creation. Scripture promises God will provide us tools to withstand life’s calamities, but not that God either gives or limits those calamities.

With each platitude, Hamilton similarly unpacks their theological meaning, and the harm they perpetuate. He admits each one has some element of truth, but that isn’t enough. When we limit our truths to easily memorized bromides, we miss God’s mission, and Christ’s love. The listeners for whom we deploy these platitudes need something deeper, so in relying on simplistic sayings, we not only short-change God, we miss our audience’s needs.

Reverend Adam Hamilton

Hamilton writes for a Christian audience, one which already believes Christ’s message of comfort and salvation in an unjust world. He writes to offer Christians necessary tools to convey that comfort to those suffering—which may, often enough, be ourselves. Too often, we Christians become so comfortable in our salvation that we reduce others’ spiritual struggles to Sunday School simplicity. Reverend Hamilton encourages us to unpack life’s difficult, subtle aspects.

If Reverend Hamilton has one overriding theme, it’s “nuance.” He expresses frustration with these platitudes because they’re unsubtle, and prevent Christians from thinking deeply about life’s most important topics. The questions which most deserve our scrutiny, get papered over with sayings we probably learned from our grandparents. Hamilton invites us to recognize that while these sayings aren’t necessarily wrong, they also seldom meet our own or anybody else’s spiritual needs.

This book began as a sermon series at Hamilton’s suburban congregation, and it retains the simple, breezy tone common in Protestant homiletics. (The publisher offers supplementary materials for adult Bible studies.) Large type and wide line spacing conceal the fact that, though over 160 pages, this book is short, barely more than a pamphlet. Hamilton offers discussion starters, not deep dives into major theological questions. That’s all some people need.

Therefore, this book whets my appetite without satisfying it. People who read voluntarily, generally want something more detailed and contemplative. Adults participating in Bible study might or might not read Hamilton’s short chapters; in-class videos, and the resulting conversation, will be the study’s heart. Hamilton briefly introduces how poets, saints, and ministers have addressed these difficult questions, then walks away, providing neither in-depth analysis nor sources for further independent study.

Don’t misunderstand me; as an introductory survey, I enjoy Hamilton’s points, and hope more Christians take his advice to heart. This book is a great beginning. But Christian bookstores are stuffed with great beginnings on important questions. Reverent Hamilton raises important points and debunks Christian myths that prevent us showing God’s love wholeheartedly. I just hope Hamilton has a follow-up pending to go deeper into the themes he raises herein.

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The Poor are Coming to Save Christians

Miguel A. De La Torre, Liberation Theology for Armchair Theologians

Jesus Christ began His ministry by standing up in congregation and proclaiming “good news to the poor,” quoting the prophet Isaiah. So why does Christianity, as an institution, spend comparatively little time and energy on the poor? Beginning mostly in the late 1960s, a growing body of parish priests and ordained pastors began shifting focus off heavenly topics, and onto saving bodies. This focus became known as “liberation theology.”

Iliff theologian Miguel De La Torre, himself a late contributor to liberation theology, offers a thumbnail summary of the movement’s beliefs and history. This isn’t always easy. Liberation theology arose from a specific historical circumstance, the peak of the Cold War, when rich nations used poor nations as chess pieces. Liberation theology sought to emphasize that poor people existed separate from American or Soviet influence, but as human beings with souls.

De La Torre’s overview therefore begins with politics. This will irritate some Christians, who think religion is somehow apolitical. De La Torre can’t survey liberation theology without talking about America’s proxy wars in Latin America, the geographical space where this movement was most public. He sometimes goes entire pages without once mentioning religion, God, or transcendence. I can already imagine the stuffed-shirt responses likely to emerge from this angle.

However, that’s the very message liberation theology conveys. Those invested in this world’s power structures must, of necessity, overlook the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed—those Jesus called “the least of these.” Telling poor indigenous people, driven off their lands by imperial ambition, to “be of good cheer” because they’ll go to heaven when they die, denies those people’s innate humanity. It tells them their struggles only matter on another plane.

Liberation theology, by contrast, doesn’t begin with right belief. It doesn’t tell people to understand esoteric concepts correctly, and everything else will follow. Instead, it starts with people’s real needs, where they live right now. As De La Torre puts it, Jesus doesn’t favor the poor and the oppressed because they’re better or more holy people; Jesus favors the poor and oppressed because they’re poor and oppressed. By extension, we should too.

Miguel A. De La Torre

Liberative theologies begin by assuming religion gives us, not an abstracted goal regarding a disembodied God, but a mission to live in this life. Jesus became embodied and walked among Jews, an occupied people and aliens in their own land, because we’re supposed to do likewise. This means resisting oppressive governments, economies, and racial hierarchies. Christians, this precept holds, are supposed to get dirty with the rest of humanity.

This book’s largest space deals with Latin American liberation theology. This is, after all, where the movement took shape, and the place where it had the largest and most cohesive identity. De La Torre, a Cuban exile and adult convert, discusses the social forces that forced liberation theologians, mostly (but not exclusively) Catholic priests, to reject theology based on “right belief,” and focus instead on how we live this life.

But De La Torre also spends time discussing other theologies from other regions. In North America, Black Liberation theology deals with ways Christians stand in solidarity against White supremacy, while feminist theology stands similarly against patriarchy. And womanist theology (a term I’ve previously misunderstood) overlaps the two, emphasizing that Black women have distinct Christian needs different from either Black men or White women.

Finally, De La Torre addresses liberative “theologies” from other religions. Sufi Islam, for instance, has a long history of opposing kings and potentates, and Gandhi’s liberative politics were informed by his Hindu beliefs, as well as the goulash of other religions he encountered walking India’s streets. Even humanist philosophies have what De La Torre considers “theologies” connecting work among the oppressed with truths that transcend human scale.

Not everyone will appreciate liberation theology. Christians who consider religion to important and pure for grubby old politics have historically disliked this approach; post-Vatican II, the Catholic Church, with its anti-communist commitments, actively silenced liberation theologians. As a Lutheran myself, I anticipate cries of “works righteousness,” my tradition’s leading wail, for a theology which insists that Christians have a responsibility to do, not just to believe.

But De La Torre’s introduction provides persuasive evidence that Christians have a God-given responsibility, not only to have a right heart, but to express that right heart through how we treat those who can do nothing for us. De La Torre not only provides a short (150 pages) introduction to why we should think this way, but also provides an extensive reading list for other sources that go into greater depth. Because if we believe, but don’t act, what do we really believe?