From Fruit to Root - A Genealogy of "Radical" Hospitality

Preface

{IN.B — In these paid subscriber only posts, I am releasing chapters from my upcoming book A Genealogy of Radical Hospitality. I am going to publish a paperback version that will likely have much more content. Paid subscribers will receive the ebook version — in their preferred format — for free.}

Preface

At around 16 or 17 years old, I had an extravagant false conversion. I drastically changed overnight from a professing atheist to the president of my high school’s Christian club. But the change only lasted until I was around 19 years old. At that point, I angrily apostatized from the Christian faith I thought I possessed. And in its place, I turned to philosophy for consolation only to find that it had nothing but despair and confusion to offer me.

It wasn’t until after much hardship in life that I came to true, saving faith.¹ I recall how God showed me mercy through his providence for my poor, struggling family, especially through the kindness and forgiveness shown to me by one of my only remaining Christian friends from high school and my early college days. He graciously gave of his time and resources to make sure that my insignificant family was provided for, showing me the love of Christ, and removing even more of my empty excuses for refusing to turn to Christ in faith and repentance. 

Although I did wrestle with many philosophical quandaries, perplexing questions raised and agitated by existential crises, I also struggled with the fact that God had directly shown me that not every Christian was a hypocrite who talked a big game about love but had no time for those outside of his cliquish, religious circle. My complaining mouth had been shut by the hand of God, the Holy Spirit working through the kindness of a friend. I understand how significant the unmerited kindness of a Christian can be to the most hard-hearted of sinners. That is why I don’t reject the idea that God can use hospitality to convict a sinner of his need for salvation.

However, it is also why I have been vocal in my opposition to Rosaria Butterfield’s popular book The Gospel Comes With a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World (hereafter, TGH). You see, TGH does not teach Christians the Scriptural form of hospitality, but a corrupted form that is rooted in anti-Christian philosophical and theological beliefs. In my previous book on this subject, I pointed out Butterfield’s postmodernist and feminist-theological foundations. In this book, I will be looking at her doctrine of hospitality in some more detail in 

I am not going to merely rehash the same points I made two years ago. Instead, I am going to show you just how deep the ungodly roots of TGH’s notion of hospitality go, as well as how far and wide the ungodly boughs of TGH’s notion of hospitality are aiming to spread. I ask for your patience, as establishing these points will take me some time. There is a lot of historical information that must first be brought to light before I can demonstrate how deep the ideological rot contained in TGH actually goes.

— Hiram R. Diaz III

1. If you want to know more of this story, see my little book Non-Neutrality: A Personal Testimony (Lewiston: Scripturalist Publications, 2017).