A detailed analysis of what Israel Folau did, why he did it, and who was offended. No prize for correctly guessing who it was!
From The Australian
By Kel Richards
Israel Folau criticised several groups in his Instagram post, but
only one of them has complained.
On April 10, Israel Folau posted on his Instagram account the
following message: “Warning: Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers,
Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolators: Hell Awaits You.
Repent! Only Jesus Saves.” Next to this big, bold statement was
the message: “Those that are living in Sin will end up in Hell
unless you repent. Jesus Christ loves you and is giving you time
to turn away from your sin and come to him.”
This eye-catching text was from the Bible, a loose paraphrase of
1 Corinthians 6:9-10: “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not
inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have
sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor
slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
If someone else had posted this it would almost certainly have
slipped under the radar. But Folau was being watched. Partly this
is because of his brilliance as a footballer. He holds the record for
the most tries scored in Super Rugby. In 2007 he won rugby
league’s Dally M Rookie of the Year award for having scored the
most tries in his debut year. In that same year he was the all-time
youngest international player (he was 18 at the time).
But it looks as though Folau was also being watched for an
opportunity to punish him for being a Christian; indeed, for being
a blunt defender of the classic, conservative Christian faith.
The attack on Folau provoked an unexpected reaction: many
Aussies were unhappy. They flooded open-line radio with calls in
support of the right of Folau to hold and express his faith. This
support was not limited to the 52.1 per cent of Australians who
called themselves Christian in the 2016 census. A bucket load of
callers took the line of “I don’t support what he said or the way he
said it, but, hey the bloke’s obviously sincere so why is he being
bashed up like this?”
Whether articulated or not, the underlying feeling of much of this
response was: Australia is a free country. There was a distinct
unease about the possibility of losing at least some degree of
freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of belief and
freedom of religion in this wide, brown land.
Tone deaf to the electorate Bill Shorten came down on the wrong
side of this debate in the election campaign. Ignoring section 116
of the Constitution, which says there shall be no religious test for
public office, Shorten demanded to know where Scott Morrison stood on the “gays/hell” issue. This blunder won him no friends
(apart from the inner-city crowd, who were already on his side).
For Rugby Australia this is a lose-lose debate. The religious test
they applied to Folau’s employment looked so unfair to him that
he bypassed their internal appeal process as pointless and
announced his intention to test them in the courts. So Rugby
Australia now will either lose the court battle or lose its major
sponsor. It has already lost its best player.
This is no storm in a tea cup: this is central to Australia’s
character as a nation and raises three questions:
● Why should there be penalties for defending classical
Christianity?
● Why do the rights of one group trump all other rights?
● What is the actual content of the view he is defending?
Let’s tackle them. First, why should there be penalties for
defending classic, conservative Christianity? It’s not as though
Christianity is an eccentric, minority belief system. It’s the largest
faith on earth with 2.3 billion followers.
Some will say people can believe what they like in private but the
views of classic Christianity do not belong in the public arena.
The problem is that Jesus ruled out that option when he said:
“Everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him
before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me
before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in
heaven.” (Matthew 10:32-33)
So according to Jesus there is no such thing as private
Christianity — there is only whole-of-life Christianity (public and
private). Being a Christian means speaking about it. The
Christian faith is part of our community and not a private matter.
Some politicians will say, “Well, we have to balance the rights of Christians to speak their faith aloud with the right of homosexuals
not to be offended.” But from the words of Jesus it is clear that
telling Christians they are not permitted to speak their faith aloud
is telling them they are not permitted to be Christian.
Which brings us to the second question: why should the rights of
one group trump all other rights? In this case it appears that the
right of homosexuals not to be offended trumps the right of
Christians to be as Christian as Jesus intended. It is especially
interesting to note that Folau included eight groups in his post —
none of the others has complained.
Surely the issue is that none of those seven other groups is
demanding approval from everyone. On the whole, drunks,
adulterers and the rest don’t care whether you approve or
disapprove of them.
The homosexual community, however, appears not to be willing
to accept disapproval. They may say all they want is tolerance.
But that’s looking increasingly like a dishonest claim. They won’t,
it seems, settle for anything short of complete approval.
Devout Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, atheists, Christians or
Calathumpians don’t expect you to approve of them. They think
they’re right, and if you believe differently you’re wrong — and
they’re quite happy to debate this with you. But they don’t
demand that you be legally compelled to approve of them, and
legally silenced and punished if you disapprove.
Which brings us to the third question: what is the actual content
of the view Folau is defending? Is it simply a system of morality?
Folau lists eight behaviours that with the support of the Bible he
says are proscribed — unacceptable to God — so it could
certainly look like a question of morality.
In part this is a problem created by the brevity of social media posts, which don’t allow for nuance. But Folau himself is pointing
beyond simple moral judgment when he writes that “Jesus Christ
loves you and is giving you time to turn away from your sin and
come to him”.
He is drawing attention to the fact that classical Christianity is
certainly about judgment, but it is also about sacrifice and
forgiveness. For 2000 years Christians have been calling it “good
news” because the news that God loves you despite your
behaviour and offers forgiveness can only count as very good
news, indeed.
This good news Folau is talking about addresses the fact of
death. The Christian world view says “people are destined to die
once, and after that to face judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).
The point is that life is a journey and, like every journey, it has an
end. It would be intelligent to give some thought to how and
where the journey of life might end. You might protest: but we
can’t know! It’s not possible to know what death will be like and
whether we might survive it, and, if so, what that survival might
be like.
Picture it as being like a group of travellers walking down a long
country road. They fall into an argument about where the road
will end. One of them may claim it ends at a steep cliff face and
that’s it. Someone else may suggest it ends at a railway station
where a train is waiting to take you back to the beginning so you
can do the journey all over again. Yet another may suggest the
road of life ends in a garden and, just like Christmas, everyone
will get gifts and be happy. Another may argue there are two
cities at the end of the road: a comfortable one (“heaven”) and a
bleak one (“hell”) and that we can be switched from the bad
option to the good option as a free gift because the lord of the road loves the travellers and has paid for the gift.
That is pretty much the state of the debate in the modern world,
and that brings us back to Folau’s warning that we should avoid
hell.
Cartoonists have had a lot of fun will hell through the years,
picturing comic demons in red tights with pitchforks prodding
hapless condemned souls into furnaces. However, all the
amusing things, or silly things, that have ever been said about
hell, or thought about hell, spring from our reluctance to seriously
consider death — what it is and what it means.
Here’s a practical definition: death really means separation.
For a start, death is the separation of the mind (or soul if you
prefer) from the body. Most human beings who have ever lived,
from Plato to now, have believed that the mind (or soul) will
survive this separation. If it doesn’t, then that answers our
question of destination. But if it does it means we are on the right
track in thinking about death as separation.
But there is another separation that counts as death: separation
from God. In classical Christianity separation from God is spiritual
death. This separation from God shows itself in a wide range of
behaviours, including the eight behaviours listed by Folau in his
Instagram post, but not limited to those eight. Because,
according to the classically Christian world view, we are designed
to function plugged in to God; once we are unplugged
(separated) we are like an unplugged appliance — we don’t
function properly or we don’t function at all.
That’s the danger Folau believed he was warning people against.
He thought he was warning his followers that those people who
ignore God, choose to be separated from God, are sending a
message; are saying to God, “just leave me alone”. The danger is God will take them at their word: they will be cut off from God
forever.
That being “cut off” is what hell is. Not the funny cartoons of
demons with pitchforks but being cut off, isolated, exiled,
expelled, separated. When Jesus himself pronounces judgment
on people the words he says are “depart from me”, adding, “I
never knew you” (Matthew 7:23).
But as Folau’s short post indicates, there is more to the story.
Here’s the completion of those words from the Bible quoted
above: “Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to
face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the
sins of many” (Hebrews 9:27-28).
There is the offer of God’s love and forgiveness and restoration:
switching at life’s end from the bad option (separation, isolation,
“hell”) to the good option (connection, community, “heaven”) as a
free gift. From the point of view of classical Christianity, Folau
saw people in danger and shouted out a warning. In other words,
the intention of his message was the exact opposite to how it has
been portrayed. And for that Folau is being punished.
Kel Richards is an author, journalist, radio personality and lay
canon at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney. He is the author of The
Aussie Bible.
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