Admonism¶

When you speak about God, you can be tempted to attract attention by frightening your audience: “If you don’t do as God tells you, you’ll end up in hell!”. I want to talk about this and therefore made up a word for it:

admonism¶: (from Latin admonire, to warn) When you understand the Gospel as a warning to which you must listen if you don’t want to burn in hell.

Admonism exists in every religion, not only in Christianity. Every Holy Scripture can be misused for threatening and frightening.

I think that the idea of God who punishes evildoers for their sins is pre-Christian. Jesus taught us to stop believing this. Jesus saved us from this idea. God sacrificed his own son as an atonement for our sins so that we can finally stop fearing he might punish us for whatever we might be doing wrong. Seen like this, every admonistic message is the opposite of the Good News. More about this in About the cross.

I’m not saying that we should avoid making mistakes. Of course we should avoid making mistakes, but because it causes harm to other people, not because God would punish us.

The Roman-Catholic church is currently learning to get rid of admonism. Getting rid of admonism should not lead us to deny the scaring passages of the Bible (The scaring parts of the Bible).

I am obviously inspired by KirchenvolksBegehren, an Austrian grass-root movement that started in the Roman-Catholic church in 1995, and which produced slogans like “Frohbotschaft statt Drohbotschaft” (“Good news, not threatful news”). This movement is promoted by popular authors like Franz Alt, who wrote a letter to the Pope in January 2019: Frohbotschaft statt Drohbotschaft. Franz Alt is himself influenced by people like Hans Küng, Johann Baptist Metz, Eugen Drewermann, Hanna Wolff, Christa Mulack and Dorothee Sölle.

Admonism causes allergic reactions on people who otherwise would follow the Good News, making them turn away in disgust.

Admonism turns the Gospel ridiculous. The following cartoon by Andy Marlette is an illustration. A group of bible-weaving admonists tries to warn visitors of a pride parade to “repent or burn”, asking “What would Jesus do?”, and Jesus passing by with a pride flag and saying “I’ll forgive you”:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/bwfkfh/a_new_commandment_i_give_unto_you_that_ye_love/

My mother used to say “Kleine Sünden bestraft der Liebe Gott sofort” when I got hurt because I hadn’t listened to her warning. But she said it with a twinkle in her eyes, like a joke, as if to remind us that we should not take this too serious. Seems that my mother is not the only one to know that sentence: Nane Jürgensen wrote Gilt „Kleine Sünden bestraft der Liebe Gott sofort“ für Sie?.

Mehta describes a situation that happened in a admonistic school: A Christian School Apologized After a Guest Speaker Wasn’t Anti-LGBTQ Enough

Yet another example: When the Gospel isn’t Good News.

Admonism is a side-effect of scriptural faith.

“One of the great liberating moments of my life was when I was given the opportunity (…) to read, analyze, critique, and appreciate the Bible as literature. I had spent the first eighteen years of my life with this book looming over me, forced to read it in its entirety every year and to memorize significant portions of it, not as perhaps the most influential book ever assembled, but rather as the inspired and literal Word of God. Studying it as literature in college turned what had been a lifelong burden into a voyage of discovery.” – Vance Morgan, When Christianity becomes an Angry and Fearful Faith