All Is Forgiven

By Marsha G. Witten

Book Overview

How the image of God is being refashioned from the Protestant pulpit for an increasingly secular world

In recent years, direct-mail Christianity has extended a new kind of invitation to the Protestant faithful: slick brochures enumerating the social and psychological advantages of church attendance, with no mention whatsoever of spiritual striving, suffering, or faith in God. Does this kind of secularity prevail in mainline Protestant churches? Marsha Witten looks for an answer to this question through an in-depth analysis of preaching on an important New Testament text: the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Witten finds that the transcendent and awesome God of Luther and Calvin, whose image informed early Protestant visions of the relationship between human beings and the divine, has been greatly softened in demeanor in American Protestant churches, with only minor resistance from conservative traditions. As preached from the pulpits of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Southern Baptist Convention, God is a deity whose primary function lies in providing psychological benefits to individual church members: the Parable of the Prodigal Son portrays God as a loving and understanding daddy figure. The focus is not on the challenges that the church could pose to the secular sphere of life. Instead, individuals are encouraged to make the right choices among the secular world's various offerings, or, as in many Southern Baptist messages, to accept God's offer of rescue from the "lostness" of secular confusions.

Situating the sermon at the heart of Protestant worship, All Is Forgiven shows how complex rhetorical strategies continue to transform Christian faith and help it survive in a secular world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 069110252X
• ISBN13: 9780691102528
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.5" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

I'm OK, You're OK - Let's not talk about sin ...

In today's world we are confronted with a gospel of easy forgiveness and cheap grace. Barely have we spoken up of our offenses, then someone reassures us that we are forgiven, don't worry about it. Churches (and pastors) buy into this new Theology because it is the kind of thing that focuses on headcounts and minimizes friction. Smile, be happy, God loves you no matter what, so let's go have fun. It sounds exaggerated, but even the most faithful preacher finds secular messages creeping into his or her sermons. We rush past the problems in the text and focus on the ending. We forget that the Prodigal Son was gone a long time before he returned home, and even then he had to hit bottom before he was ready to admit he was wrong. As I struggled through this book I found myself asking about my own sermons. Was I remaining true to the text and still conveying a contemporary message? Was I allowing my listeners to spend time in the struggle? Or was I spoon feeding them an easy message they wanted to hear? Marsha Witten does an excellent job in "All is Forgiven" in researching and addressing these issues. I recommend it for all who are responsible for preaching, choosing materials for teaching Sunday School and Vacation Bible School, and who are leaders in the church.

Therapeutic Gospel

Growing churches, it seems, proclaim an attractive message which warms hearers' hearts. That's what Marsha G. Witten found in her study, All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c. 1993). The "GOOD NEWS" announced in an invitational brochure from a new, nearby Baptist church, was the planting of "a new church designed to meet your needs in the 1990's" (p. 3). The materials received imitated "the slick direct-mail solicitation of a credit card or insurance company" with appeals to "the social and psychological pleasures one might receive" from joining up (p. 4). Interested (as a sociologist, not as a believer, which she is not) in what was being preached in modern churches, Witten sent questionnaires to pastors in Presbyterian (USA) and Southern Baptist churches, asking for copies of sermons preached on the parable of the prodigal son. She analyzed 47 sermons, about equally balanced between the two churches. Before proceeding further, it's important to discount some of Witten's conclusions on the basis of her methodology. To ask preachers for sermons on a distinctive text, rather than studying, for example, all the sermons preached in the course of a year, rather predetermines the emphases one will find. The truth found in the parable of the prodigal son is an important truth, not the sole truth of the Scripture! Had Witten asked for sermons based on the Sermon on the Mount or the Epistle of James she would have found significantly other truths being proclaimed from the same pulpits! It's also important to remember Witten's non-Christian perspective. Certainly it gives her a certain detachment, a scholarly "objectivity" admired in the academy. But it also prevents her from fully understanding the theological nuances and hermeneutical principles which would place the sermons in a more balanced context. Those caveats aside, Witten's book still makes an important point: the sermons she studied, to the extent they reflect what folks in America's churches hear, portray a thoroughly secularized version of Christianity which bears little resemblance to the more demanding Gospel heard by our ancestors. With a few exceptions, the sermons Witten studied reveal some fundamental accommodations to our secular society. God no longer appears as a high and holy "wholly other" Being; rather he tends to be portrayed as "Daddy, Sufferer, Lover." In four-fifths of the sermons, "God is portrayed exclusively or predominantly in terms or the positive functions he serves for men and women. Chief among these functions is one that can be labeled 'therapeutic'" (p. 35). God is described, rather routinely it seems, "as Significant Other, who provides comfort, counsel, and understanding for the individual's psychological concerns" (pp. 130-131). Thus God is routinely called a "Daddy" who suffers deep emotional distress when we err. Though only once in the New Testament did Jes