God Deleted From Worship, Replaced With Ricky Ricardo

By Joe Bob Briggs 01/15/2008

Professors at Dallas Theological Seminary published a position paper Tuesday eliminating the concept of “God” and/or “Lord” from Christian worship and replacing it with worship of the Bible only. The step had been anticipated for several years and was considered a formality within the actual “Bible only” movement, but there were a few theologians from an older generation who waxed nostalgic about the change.

“A lot of these young guys don’t go back this far,” said Willard “Flip” Rasmussen, head of the Department of Greek Hermeneutics and Computer Science, “but back in the late seventies, early eighties, I would frequently preach about God. I don’t mean the way we say it today—I mean, we’ll probably always say it—we would really talk about him like he was capitalized and everything. But around 1985 it all became Word of God, Truth of God, God’s Revelation—we pretty much narrowed it down to this little baby right here”—plunking a Scofield Reference Bible—“or, for your students, this monster over here”—picking up a Greek New Testament. “In some ways I miss those days. God was a rascal when we still had him around.”
The only churches to be immediately affected by the position paper are the evangelical “Bible churches,” most of them pastored by DTS graduates, but several other denominations are expected to follow suit, including the Southern Baptists, the Church of God, the other Church of God, the Church of God Universal, the Assembly of God, and the Church of God’s Assembly. Ironically, several denominations using “God” in their actual name have not worshipped the deity himself for at least twenty years, but so far none of them have suggested changing names to reflect the new reality.

“Sure, we could go Assembly of the Book or Church of the Word or something like that,” said Roger Flanders, official spokesperson for the Church of the Universal God of Gods in Dayton, Tennessee. “We’ve talked about it. We’ve had marketing meetings. But you can’t go against your brand. The logo is out there. People know what it means. Look at it this way. Frito-Lay hasn’t sold any Fritos for a long time now. It’s all Doritos, right? But would they change that Frito name? I don’t think so.”

Among other worshippers likely to welcome the change are the so-called megachurches, many of them named after the natural environment (Saddleback, Lakewood, etc.) in the manner of real estate subdivisions and pagan Canaanite cults. “To tell you the truth,” said Meg Strothers, leader of the women’s athletic leagues at Grove Mountain Cathedral in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, “I’ve never been that comfortable with the G-word. It’s not that we have anything against God, it’s just that you say that and everybody is like, ‘What the flip?’ Let’s be honest, it’s a vague concept. It confuses the children.”

Not all the reaction was positive. Some individual churches in parts of eastern North Dakota and rural Florida issued statements saying they were continuing to worship God, even at the expense of Biblical inerrancy, and that, if forced to choose between God and the Bible, they might be seeking affiliations with Nigerian archbishops. At Harvard Divinity School, there was a concern that the position paper didn’t go far enough. “We stopped teaching the worship of God in the 1950s,” said Dr. Hildegard Wittman-Brumley, “so in one sense this is a welcome development. However, to merely replace one form of dead Christendom with an equally senile brand of pentecostal literalism is, in our view, less than postmodern.”

Most of the denominations and churches involved will be working out the implications of the new policy at their various conventions and retreats throughout the year, but one source of possible sectarianism has already reared its ugly head: Which Bible is considered the Bible? At the press conference announcing the change, a DTS professor clumsily laid his King James on a chapel pew at the same moment that the seminary president was holding aloft a New International. In his haste not to cause offense, the professor grabbed for the text and knocked it onto the floor, which resulted in gasps from the audience and a later frenzied debate about whether the Bible now needs to be ritually burned. Meanwhile, in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, a Bible-worshipper from the other side of the aisle, the Reverend William “Bill” McWilliam, publicly burned his New International on purpose as an act of protest while preaching from the Living Word Bible, resulting in a criminal citation from the fire marshall for lighting fires in close proximity to sleeping people.

The only other issue that still needs to be worked out theologically is how to preach the literal truth of the one Bible without mentioning either God, Yahweh, Jehovah, the Lord, etc. “But actually, wasn’t that always the problem?” said Rasmussen. “Too many names, too many concepts. We’re just telescoping all that stuff into one term. We’re re-branding. If you have to talk about a higher power, you just say Ricky Ricardo. It’s consumer-friendly, everybody knows Ricky Ricardo, everybody likes Ricky Ricardo, and it’s still in syndication in most markets so it’s hip without being ridiculously up-to-date.”

One worry at this early stage is that stay-at-home believers who get most of their Bible study from television won’t fully understand the implications of worshipping the book itself instead of a universal force who either wrote the book or spoke it into existence or otherwise caused its appearance. “That’s the same thing, though,,” said Paul Crouch of the Trinity Broadcasting Network when asked about it, “because the Bible is magic. It’s a magic book. The only difference now is we’re not making a big deal about where the magic came from. We’ve got research on this.”

That research, according to Barna Associates, was carried out in focus groups with Christians who had donated at least $10,000 to evangelists in a single fiscal year. Without being told the nature of the experiment, these donors were placed in a temperature-controlled room and shown three altars. On the first altar were various images of God, including a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, George Burns in character, and a multi-media collage from a Soho gallery representing the creative spark. When these objects were hacked to smithereens with a four-foot pickax, there were expressions of only mild disapproval from the focus group.
On the second altar, researchers placed various Bibles, from plain miniature New Testaments to ornate hand-lettered Latin editions from the Middle Ages. When the Bibles were first ripped into pieces, then burned, there were cries of protest, wailing, tears, and loud accusations of blasphemy that only be quelled after several minutes. According to data analysts, the Bible burning registered a 64 on the destruction-of-cherished-belief-systems scale, compared to only an 8 for the God-demolishing.

As a control experiment, and mainly at the request of Benny Hinn Ministries, which financed most of the research, a third altar was decked out with various western currencies, including the dollar, the Euro, the pound sterling, and the Swiss franc. At a pre-determined signal, about $100,000 in bank notes were doused with kerosene and ignited, causing panic, hysteria, screams of agony, and a mad rush as several people tried to put out the fire with their own bodies. Barna reported a 98 on the belief-system scale and most of the focus group required subsequent counseling. All of the television ministries pronounced themselves pleased with the results, indicating that you could eliminate one focus of the Bible, but as long as you kept the other one in sharp relief, there was no danger of losing the attention of the main body of believers.