“Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise;
When he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.”
-Proverbs 17:28
It may surprise you, gentle reader, to hear my confession that I am breathlessly thrilled at the reaction to the most recent manifestation of Pat Robertson’s chronic inability to keep his mouth shut. That is to say, I am honestly, truly thrilled that the false prophet has an almost pathological inability to critically and rationally engage with the world around him, that his opinions are nothing less than monumental pillars to the human ability to evacuate words of logic, and that his heretical idiocy has achieved such a stentorious level as to make glib dismissal an impossibility.
The first reason I rejoice is that Pat Robertson’s egregious ignorance about the intricate beauty of the Christian faith has been exposed once again. His unilateral insistence that a man is doctrinally justified in abandoning his Alzheimer’s-laden wife is merely another point in Robertson’s already expansive resume of gaffes. Neither is he alone in his paucity of doctrinal perspicuity. On the contrary, he takes his place among a voluminous company who are similarly infected. The unlikely marriage of Jesus Christ and the Hallmark Greeting Card Co. have saturated America with a fluffy, cotton-candy Christianity whose primary potency is the peddling of trinkets emblazoned with Bible verses taken out of context to be placed on toilets, refrigerators, and sofa pillows. Such bland spiritualism is the diuretic of discipleship; its vapidity ensures the ejection of all weighty doctrinal and experiential Truths of the revered faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” This is the spiritual junk food that Pat Robertson has shoveled down the gullet of nominal American Christians for decades, but before we unsheathe the rightfully accusatory finger against him, Confessional, Biblical Christians ought to observe an opportunity to repent for making his travesty possible.
That Pat Robertson is a peddler of plastic platitudes (theology is far too noble a word for what it is that he casts to the four winds) is his sin; that blood is on his head. But that that the nominal believers that comprise his audience do not know better is an abject failure of the churches to stress discipleship and doctrine. Upon leaving the elders at Ephesus, Paul was able to boldly declare “I am innocent of the blood of you all for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 22:26-27). I shudder to think how few pastors and teachers in our churches today would be able justly to echo these words. Pat Robertson is only one of a host of radio preachers and TV evangelists filled with personality and devoid of charisma (in the 1 Corinthians sense), and though his abrasive stupidity is tending progressively to relegate him to a mere amusement, it would be naïve to fail to recognize the hosts of gospel-peddlers who, with toll-free number in hand, would rise up to replace him.
The second reason for my joy at his comments is the reaction it has sparked among Christians. The dominant effect of him airing his heretical opinions about marriage have kindled fires of righteous indignation in Christians for whom I often feared such sentiments were beyond their range of feeling. Robertson’s cruelty and his “repudiation of the gospel of Jesus Christ”, as Russell Moore categorized it with equal parts fervency and accuracy, is deserving of the harshest censure that can be roused from the depths of our souls. The anger of the Christian ought to blaze as a forest fire between the firelines of our humble pleading for his repentance and our longsuffering willingness to embrace him as a brother in Christ should he turn from his sin and become a Christian. If Robertson’s comments have exposed the insufficiency of our tepidity and passivity, then it is an evidence of grace. The time has not only for Christians to regain the intellectual rigor of our great Faith, but also to learn deep, righteous, passionate, godly feeling that is nonplussed by the junk-food of bumper stickers and cultural Christianity because we are frequent diners at the deep, rich, satisfying banqueting table of the Lamb. Public proclamations of unabashed heresy and theological distortions of the type that Pat Robertson has so recently modeled ought to elicit a righteous indignation that will not be satiated until the injustice is corrected as well as humble prayers that we will be spared from the same error.
And finally, I am pleased that the reaction to his comments has revealed the lines of demarcation between the Christian philosophy of marriage and the secular surrogate for the same. Robertson’s comments did arouse censure from many liberal individualists, but those voices were at least matched by Ph.D.s and other “experts” who filled the morning talk shows with reiterations of an individualist, Lockean-based consent theory of marriage. “Let us not so quickly excuse Robertson’s comments,” they counseled. “This decision ought to be made after careful consideration of the well-being and lifestyle choices of the healthy spouse.” In contrast to that are the reaffirmations of marriage and self-sacrificial commitment by many Christians such as Robert McQuilken. These contrasting responses make it clear that the distinction between a consensual, contractual version of marriage and a Biblical, self-sacrificing view of marriage is a weighty one. For the Christian, marriage is always an allegory of Christ’s relationship with the Church, a relationship not based upon convenience and self-interest. Consequently, in his advocacy of disposable marriage, Pat Robertson tells lies about Christ. There are few sins as weighty as that.
