Washington Post Op-Ed: The Shrinking God of Jim Bakker, by David Von Drehle:

I imagine this might be the first and only time the writer Annie Dillard will be mentioned in a sentence alongside the grifting evangelist Jim Bakker. But if Dillard had not died recently, I would not have been rereading her intensely spiritual work at the same time that news came Monday of Bakker’s death at 86. And as a result, I might have missed an important theme of Bakker’s public life.

Dillard’s great project, through her nonfiction books, essays, poems, novels, unpublished notebooks, watercolor paintings and live-wire conversation — not to mention her voracious reading, long walks, beachcombing, enthusiastic dancing and spirited sing-alongs — was to learn as much as she could about God. Unlike those metaphysical seekers who content themselves with the study of scriptures and other secondhand sources, Dillard examined God through the world he made, the way it does and does not work, the things revealed and the things left mysterious.

She concluded, among many other things, that most of us are not serious when we talk about God and, bless our hearts, don’t realize how unserious we are. In perhaps her most-quoted summation of this insight, from her essay collection “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” she wrote: “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Religions profess to believe in an infinite, all-powerful God, omniscient, beyond time — and in the same breath reduce him to the pages of a book, an inscription on marble tablets, a hired gun to train on one’s enemies, a genie summoned to grant wishes.

Bakker’s formative years were immersed in the Assemblies of God, which taught of an unbridled, immanent, miraculous deity, an unpredictable God who might ignite a believer’s heart or bestow the gift of tongues without warning. But by the time he and his wife, Tammy Faye, came to prominence under the auspices of broadcaster Pat Robertson, Bakker had become an exponent of the so-called prosperity gospel, with its modest God of tollbooth transactions.

During their rise to TV prominence in the 1980s, the Bakkers sold the idea of a God who demands certain behaviors and sacrifices from his people and — if he gets what he wants — will bestow gifts of wealth, health and happiness. God is a celestial ATM, coughing up the cash we’ve banked through our displays of virtue plus the interest earned by his grace, provided we enter the right scriptural PIN. …

The God of the prosperity gospel was really no greater than the squabbling mercenary gods of the Greeks and Romans, jealous clerks in the great department store of nature, this one dispensing rain, that one arranging harvests, a god of love patrolling the lingerie department. …

The problem, as Annie Dillard perceived, is the unbridgeable gap between what we can feel as humans and what we can understand. In the immensity of the stars and the complexity of the living world, in the intensity of love and the ocean of time, we can sense a corner of the infinite. But to begin to understand — rather than simply sense with reverence — the infinite means giving it definition.

Bakker’s boyhood experience of the wild, unruly Pentecostal God might have matured into a due humility, a dumbstruck awe and a sense of wonder. Instead, he pursued a deity he could manage, even turn to his own purposes. That was the problem. For such a God has limits, and limits are the opposite of God.

• Baptist News Global, Let Me Tell You About Annie Dillard
• Christianity Today, When Annie Dillard Met James Kilgo
• The Christian Century, Annie Dillard’s Unrestrained Hallelujah: The Visionary Writer Showed Us That Paying Attention Could Make Us Certain That the World Is Holy
• The Christian Century, I Mourned Annie Dillard As If I Knew Her Personally

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