Bad Theology meets Bad PHP

I am a web developer by day. This is probably pretty boring to most of you. It means that I sit in front of the computer for at least 8 hours hacking away at the keyboard with my fat fingers to make sites like DEEPERDEVOTION.com work the way the do. The programing language that I code in is called PHP. As are all programing languages, PHP is very logical and most people could read simple code easily to understand what it is doing because it uses english words like ‘if’, ‘then’, ‘else’, etc.

This morning I ran across a t-shirt on cafepress.com that was somebody’s attempt to declare their theology with PHP. It went like this:

There are a couple things wrong with this attempt at being clever:

1. As far as the PHP goes, there are multiple errors
   1. Words that start with a dollar sign in PHP are called variables. They represent something. They have to be set somewhere before they can be used. $jesus is not defined anywhere so it can’t be compared to ‘Lord’. That’s an error.
   2. PHP functions happen between opening and closing squiggly brackets { … }. This code has an error in that the opening bracket is a closing bracket.
   3. PHP functions receive information (variables), process it, and return it to where it came from (most of the time). This function doesn’t receive or return any data.
2. Theologically (and more importantly) there are a couple errors as well
   1. Romans 10:9 (for your reference): “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;”
   2. First, the conditional statement does not align with Scripture. The author says ‘if Jesus is Lord, you will be saved.’ If you believe Scripture, you know that Jesus is Lord regardless of whether one believes it or not. That means that the above conditional “if Jesus is equal to Lord” will always return true… which means $you would always equal to ‘being saved’.
   3. Second, The conditional statement is incomplete… even if it worked correctly. Paul’s conditions are outlined below:
      1. You must confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord (which he is even if you don’t confess).
      2. You must believe in your heart that Jesus is risen from the dead.
      3. Only if those two things are true does Paul contend that you “will be saved”.

So, why take the time to outline this?

Countless believers make statements like this every day of their life without knowing it. We try to insert the gospel into a context that will make it accessible to non-believers. In doing so, we water it down or we misrepresent the message of Jesus because a) we don’t understand the basis of the message correctly ourselves (the theological errors mentioned above) or b) we commit gramatical and logical mistakes in our rush to ‘market’ the gospel (the PHP errors mentioned above). Such mistakes are detrimental to the person of Jesus. Christians all too often paint a horrible picture of the gospel and this is all the exposure that unbelievers get to the gospel.

Case in point

This shirt was brought to my attention on Twitter by another PHP developer that I respect for his coding and professional work. To my knowledge he has never professed to believe Jesus is Lord and, to the counter,  made the following statements concerning this shirt:

• It’s deeply satisfying that this PHP+Jesus shirt would cause a fatal error and nothing happens even IF $jesus==”Lord”
• $you = ‘saved’? What does that mean? If $jesus != “Lord”, what is $you? Christian theology at its best folks.

You know what. I agreed with him on everything other than ‘This is Christian theology at is best”. I believe this is at its worst, but nonetheless, I acknowledged to him that this is popular christian theology. This is what we wear (literally and figuratively) and this is how unbelievers respond.

I’m grateful for this individuals insight into ‘christian culture’ and I think he hit the nail on the head.

So what can you do to better your theology. Its actually pretty simple: read the scriptures and think before you speak (or write in PHP) your beliefs. In fact, it’s so easy that this individual nailed the gospel head on by providing his own code here: http://pastie.org/928094 Note: his ‘zombie_jesus’ is equal to what you would call the ‘resurrected Jesus’.