This weekend golfer Zach Johnson turned in an impressive performance and won The Master’s. He was able to hold off Tiger Woods down the stretch to come away with his first green jacket and only his second victory on the PGA tour.
Apparently Johnson is known for his faith. He climbed up onto the riser behind the 18th green and joked that he should “start preaching”. Then he let everyone know what his aim was for the weekend:
“Regardless of what happened today, my responsibility was to glorify God. Hopefully I did.”
Well this is a great encouragement to hear someone present a good biblical work ethic, especially in the arena of professional sports.
I do wish that Johnson would have stopped there, however.
Johnson went on to say:
“I don’t know if I was necessarily calm. I had some people looking after me today. Being Easter, my faith is very important to me….I felt Jesus, I felt my grandfather, my family, everybody…So it was awesome.”
You felt Jesus, your grandfather, and everybody? What does this mean? What did Jesus feel like?
I’m assuming that his grandfather has passed away and this was one of those “he is looking down on me” things. The feeling Jesus thing is a little strange as well. And what does he mean by feeling everybody?
This is the sad offspring of the evangelical mystic theology that is so prevalent in America today. Evangelicals so tend to elevate feelings to a level of authority. It is the inside out (subjective) revelation rather than the outside in (objective) approach to revelation.
I don’t want to be hard on Johnson, nitpick his words or try to dissect his theology. I am encouraged that he was aiming to glorify God. However, as a Christian I am continually alarmed by the elevation of these fuzzy feelings to such unbiblical and unlikely levels of authority. This is the culture that we as American evangelicals have created through our ill advised marriage with New Age pagan mysticism, and it is a shame.
I can’t help but think if this guy was alive and won a major golfing tournament when the Puritans dominated the religious scene in America that he would have stopped with his mission to glorify God and give him thanks for a victory. This type of thing motivates me to study, teach, model faithful handling of the word, and faithful speech concerning God. All of this that we might be part of drawing folks back to the Scripture as the authority, governor and interpreter of our feelings.
And I do want to reiterate that I am not picking on Zach Johnson and am encouraged by what seems like a sincere desire to glorify God, from what I have read he is a professing Christian. We are all growing, including both me and Zach Johnson. His post tournament speech, however, is a telling commentary on the contemporary religious scene and should serve as both a rebuke to evangelicalism and an encouragement to revisit the sufficiency of Scripture in our own lives and churches.