If you're anything like me, you love when an expert on a subject expands your understanding of a certain topic, giving you new lenses through which to view all future encounters with said subject. While we’d like to pretend that we already know everything, the fact is that there are a lot of things in life that we stare at with blurred vision, waiting for someone to teach us new ways of interpreting and conceiving that which we're attempting to see.
In that regard, I found a recent post on the subject of guilt from biblical counselor Ed Welch to be very helpful (you can read it here). Welch claims that the majority of persons regularly feel something that they would identify as "guilt." However, he suggests that what they know to be guilt might actually be something quite different. He goes on to posit five experiences that we tend to call guilt:
1. Guilt (Proper) - a genuine feeling of the weight of my sin(s) against God
2. Legalism/Works Righteousness - a feeling of guilt for failing to earn my own
salvation
3. Shame - a feeling brought on by the social implications of our sin or, having been
sinned against
4. Being Controlled by the Opinions of Others - a feeling associated with the belief that
one can never measure up to the expectation of others
5. Being a Human Being - feelings of inadequacy that are simply related to the limited
and finite nature of being human
What I find so interesting about these five experiences is that a) they each require a different approach, whether you’re offering counsel or dealing with your own sense of "guilt," as Welch so helpfully points out. And, more importantly, b) each experience, when properly comprehended, will drive us to the Gospel.
So, in the case of "Guilt (Proper)," it is only the Gospel of Christ crucified, buried, and risen that can address the very real nature of our guilty standing before God. When it comes to "Works Righteousness," it is only the Gospel of grace that can free us from the endless cycle of performance through which we are trying to save ourselves. "Shame," whether brought on by our own sins or the sins of another, also finds its solution in the Gospel. The grace of God bestowed upon us in Christ, which tells us that we have been loved in spite of our sins, assures us that though the entire world might look on us with disdain, God views us through the perfect, spotless righteousness of Christ. It's also true that the Gospel has the power to nip "People-Pleasing"in the bud. Because God is pleased with us in Christ, we need not go to extreme lengths to please others, instead we are freed to walk confidently having received the ultimate word of approval in Christ. And, finally, the limits and finitude that are so real to us as those who are busy "being human beings," cause us to recognize our inadequacy to overcome any of the previous four experiences of guilt in our own power.
"Guilt," no matter how it is commonly used or how you choose to parse it, ultimately forces us to seek salvation, freedom, cleansing, approval, and power outside of ourselves. May our “guilt,” whatever experience actually lies behind it, cause us to turn to Christ clothed in the Gospel as our only hope for redemption.
On their website (http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html), photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have a pictorial montage from their work “The Ruins of Detroit,” which is about to be released as a book. The work is a series of images formerly grand buildings, now desolate in the city of Detriot. The images of extravagant buildings like Michigan Central Station and United Artists Theater, as well as more simple but beautiful buildings such as First Unitarian Church and East Methodist Church, present us with the symbolic death of a city – a once great American city.
I know some people who began planting a church in Detroit a few years ago. Certainly many people – certainly many churches for that matter – would consider such an effort to be worthless; and unfortunately, I don’t know how things have gone for them. Yet I know from the works of Rodney Stark, Wayne Meeks, and others that this sort of supposedly purposeless work played a considerable part in the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Christianity was born out of dying cities. When sickness and famine struck in the Roman Empire, Christians stayed behind and cared for those who seemed worthless to the rest of the world. These images call to mind a great cultural tragedy, but more than that remind the church of its clear calling to seek out those which the world has not valued.
The Invention of Lying (2009) is a flawed but very interesting film that surprisingly illustrates the uniqueness of the gospel of Jesus. Starring Ricky Gervais, the movie portrays a world in which only one man (Gervais) can lie. And in order to deal with the fear and uncertainty of death, this one liar invents a religion: There is a man in the sky who will reward you if you are good but punish you if you do three bad things.
This is not only a funny scene but as religion, it's typical. It's a great illustration of the kind of religion that humans make: save yourself through good works. Whether it's Santa Claus or the idolatries of Molech or Baal, human beings make religions that involve self salvation through avoiding "naughty" and accomplishing "nice".
The Bible presents an utterly unique "man in the sky" who is a trinity and accomplishes perfect works as a member of the human race (Jesus) and offers salvation freely as a gift. There is no precedent or successor for this "religion". Human kind cannot "invent" this kind of religion; it is too humiliating to the self-saved and too forgiving of the "sinner". It has been said that this is not religion or irreligion. It is something else altogether.
Perhaps Gervais (who co-wrote the film) intends to comically portray religion as a well intentioned lie. I tend to agree. That's why I'm a Christian.
Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3 Give us each day our daily bread, nd forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.” 5 And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, 6 for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. 9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 11 What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
- Luke 11:1:13
Although there are specific ways we ought to pray, when the Bible talks about prayer, it does not primarily emphasize a method or strategy but more about how to commune with a living God. The psalms are immensely helpful in this sense since there are certain non-negotiable essentials we need to incorporate into our prayers which are important. But at the foundation or the heart of prayer, we need to understand that prayer itself is not the ultimate goal of the Christian life. Prayer is but a means to bring the Christian to God, in other words, prayer ought to be a practice of grace that God allows an individual to utilize in order to develop intimacy with him.
What we often times find is that prayer is not just a means of grace which Christians or religious people use, but it is a vehicle which everyone uses, whether you have a personal or impersonal relationship with some sort of immaterial or material source or force. Therefore, all people have a relationship with this mode of communication, even though they might not think of it in this way. And so everyone prays, to either a personal being or impersonal things. The question is, is that relationship or the object of one’s own affections reliable? Is he alive? Is it real? Is it personal? And that is what the Bible is trying to teach. If a person wants to know God or if he wants to know the Gospel, then he’ll find it in prayer. Often times we are surprised, when we listen to a sermon series on prayer, to learn more about the doctrine of God than the various modes of praying. Because if an individual understands who God is and how he has revealed himself through the Scriptures and through history then he will be compelled to pray, joyfully and not begrudgingly. His affections will be stirred in such a way that he will not merely say “this is my duty,” but that “this is my joy and my delight.” His heart will be moved to the presence of God.
In accord with the Pew Forum on Religion (Landscape Survey, Feb-June 2008) I commented in my last blog that church commitment sits lightly on those who attend church. The study told us that Americans shop for church as they might shop for groceries. The danger is that choices take on a life of their own and become more dominant than the churches chosen.
Intentionally chosen relationships do not last very long and if they do they endure in very different forms than originally conceived. Marriages that last survive on grounds very different than that which motivated the original attraction. Friendships that endure are not very often chosen, but simply “happen” to us.
Robert Putnam in his influential work, Bowling Alone, reminded us that our American penchant for choosing often leaves us feeling alone in life. Our choices cannot be sovereign because we inevitably bump into other people who also have their own choices to make. The mechanisms of democracy might give us a political arena in which we have learned to live with these differences, but that diversity of choices does not work so well in the communities that matter more urgently and concretely to us.
The church is the community where the “individual-as-chooser” never quite feels at home. Church is a place that infringes upon choices, and eventually everyone feels like an outsider because they have bumped into people who make different choices than they do. Pastors that don’t recognize this in-built network of potential frictions are ripe for burnout. Parishoners that hope they will eventually find a church where everyone will choose as they do are bound to feel restless in every church they choose.
Gaining traction on this issue requires that we be much more honest about the emotional cost of loneliness and by contrast the benefits of giving up many of our choices. The gospel is a radical form of hospitality that invites outsiders into a new way of thinking about choices and communities. The gospel is about belonging, not to ourselves, but to the Triune God and because of that belonging to others. If we are honest with our own inveterate loneliness, belonging to others can be very attractive. And if God hard wires us this way, little wonder that we feel relief when we no longer simply belong to ourselves. Impossible communities become possible in the gospel.
In her book, Why Our Schools Need the Arts, Jessica Hoffmann Davis (founder of the Arts in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education) writes,
“I would like to propose that an equally good reason [to include arts in education] is that they provide opportunities for failure to children who succeed in other areas. Indeed, the arts provide opportunities for failure to all kinds of children.”
Even though we may cognitively agree that learning from our mistakes is a good thing in the end, no one likes making mistakes, let alone learning from them. However, Davis says that failure is something not to be avoided, but rather embraced. Although her main intention is to advocate for arts education in a child’s core curriculum, perhaps there is something more to be gleaned from her words. You can almost hear echoes of gospel truth in what she writes. The gospel says that embracing our failures is the beginning of not being a failure.
Part of the human experience is the suppression of shame.Adam’s “streak” through the Garden and his sudden realization that he was fully exposed – before his wife and before his God – and the ensuing “cover-up,” is a trademark of being human.Said more simply: as individuals we hate to be exposed, we fear public embarrassment, we loathe humiliation.No one likes looking stupid, inviting a laugh or a stare at their own expense.
Southwest Airlines has produced a series of witty ads built around the entire theme of embarrassment with the catch phrase “Wanna get away?”
We laugh as individuals find themselves in outrageously embarrassing scenarios, yet we cringe imagining ourselves in the same situation.The question “Wanna get away?” is simply a point of rhetoric.Of course we want to get away!We want to get as far away from our shame, embarrassment, and humiliation as we possibly can.
Within the mystery of the gospel we see a different picture painted of the Son of God.Instead of running away from embarrassment and humiliation he uniquely ran toward it.His entire life was one marked by public harassment, shame, embarrassment and humiliation.Rather than a pompous display of divinity, Christ selectively and nearly secretly revealed his glory.He was born homeless, was continually poor and itinerant (Matt 8:20), lived as a servant of all, was chastised, mocked, rejected and denied by his closest friends, considered an “enemy of the state,” delivered up for trial by those he came to save, was crucified upon a criminal’s cross, naked, exposed, hated, and finally dead.If this isn’t humiliation I’m not sure what is.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.Philippians 2:5-8
Christ came to earth for the humiliation. He came for the embarrassment. He came for the shame. Ultimately he came to release you and me from the shame and embarrassment of our own sin. He left the comforts of heaven for the discomforts of earth so that you and I might not cringe under the scrutiny of embarrassment any longer. If we were to categorize humiliation as “involuntary humility” then it might suffice to consider Christ’s activity as “voluntary humiliation.” But the world has no categories for this sort of love – in fact they call it “foolish” (I Cor. 1:25-29). But as Christians we call this Incarnational grace.
Whether Shephard Fairey's use of an AP photo for his now infamous Obama "Hope" poster, or DJ Dangermouse's marrying of The Beatles and Jay-Z for his "Grey Album," creative appropriation of another's artistic work has become par for the course in most sectors of the art world in the 21st century. Perhaps the final frontier for remixers, rehashers, and mashupers is the world of literature. According to Randy Kennedy at the New York Times, this is in fact the case. However, the frontier may not remain unexplored for much longer as a new wave of literary artists are quite literally taking their cues from those who have gone before them, borrowing quotations and even entire sections without citing or giving credit to their sources. Plagiarism? Yes. New form of artistic expression? Perhaps. While it's not surprising that the idea should strike us as odd, the closing thoughts of Kennedy's article, provided by Harvard professor Louis Menand, suggest that we've adapted to changes like this before:
"If the results are compelling and profound enough, even rigid conventions come around to making what seemed like a sin into a virtue. 'If something is really successful, then the law tends to get changed and society changes to allow it to happen..."
While the advent of literary remixing may not be entirely bad (especially if publishers find legal ways to do it), the trend is suggestive of much of postmodernity. We live in a world where nothing belongs to anyone, everything belongs to everyone, sin is easily transformed into virtue, and prohibition is quickly converted into prescription. For more, read the whole article here. (HT - ArtsJournal).
John Lee, manager of the last working farm in Boston, MA (Allandale Farm), reflects on the dangers of bringing his Blackberry with him to the fields. While acknowledging that without it he would “get less done more often than not,” he offers this perspective on how life in the fields has changed in light of new technologies:
“I am never alone any more in my fields. Quiet mornings or quiescent evenings on or off the tractor are frequently interrupted for no good reason as far as I can fathom. It is not as though I am communing with the lettuce, but if I am going to be a successful grower, I do need to pay attention. I need to notice which predator is preparing to wreak havoc in my whatever and not [know] that some blazing irrelevancy is awaiting my intemperate attention. Multi-tasking in the fields may be less personally dangerous, but it sometimes provokes me to fits of untimely forgetfulness for which I need to double-time later.” [1]
We might benefit from metaphorically applying his thoughts to both Christian devotion and ministry. While new technologies and social media platforms can provide us ways to become more efficient and/or connected, on the flip side, they offer plenty of opportunities “to get little done while thinking we are accomplishing something significant.”
What have been the effects, positive or negative, of new technologies, social media, etc., on your devotion and/or ministry? How can these tools be used wisely in service of the gospel?
[1] Lee, John. “Farmer’s Diary: Stolen Time.” Edible Boston. No. 15. Winter 2010. p. 19. Read the whole thing at http://www.ediblecommunities.com/boston/winter-2010/farmers-diary.htm
In an essay entitled “Puritans and Prigs,” Marilynne Robinson observes:
Optimists of any kind are rare among us now. Rather than entertaining visions, we think in terms of stopgaps and improvisations. A great many of us, in the face of recent experience, have arrived with a jolt at the archaic-sounding conclusion that morality was the glue holding society together, just when we were in the middle of proving that it was a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills. It is not easy at this point for us to decide just what morality is or how to apply it to our circumstances. But we have priggishness at hand, up-to-date and eager to go to work, and it does a fine imitation of morality, as self-persuaded as a Method actor. It looks like morality and feels like it, both to those who wield it and to those who taste its lash…
So perhaps what I have called priggishness is useful in the absence of true morality, which requires years of development, perhaps thousands of years, and cannot simply be summoned as needed. Its inwardness and quietism make its presence difficult to sense, let alone quantify, and they make its expression often idiosyncratic and hard to control. But priggishness makes its presence felt. And it is highly predictable because it is nothing else than a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring. The prig’s formidable leverage comes from the fact that his or her ideas, notions, or habits are always fine variations on the commonplace. A prig with original ideas is a contradiction in terms, because he or she is a creature of consensus who can usually appeal to one’s better nature, if only in order to embarrass dissent.[1]
In all of her essays, Robinson has labored to demonstrate that we have assumed (and often misguided) notions about history and the great works of historical characters. In this essay she has pointed out that the Puritans were very socially conscious and not nearly so anxious about sexuality and related issues. By identifying anything related to serious moral thought with a received mythology of Puritan thought, we have truncated our moral discourse; and now we have been left with a priggish set of attitudes which represent only contemporary populist tastes.
If she is correct, we could say a lot about these conclusions. However, I find it most interesting that we ironically have a new kind of Puritanism – more fickle, more judgmental, yet more shallow – than the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony could ever have dreamt. We have come quite close to achieving the Nietzschean dream of morals as pure construct, and in so doing we have accomplished an even more Puritanically oppressive ethical world. Now even the expression of opinions – however ignorant or misguided – must be reprimanded.
[1] Marilynne Robinson, “Puritans and Prigs” in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, 1998), pp. 158-160.
A Colin Hansen article in CT (“Mobile No More” May 4, 2009) referenced Stephen’s Gospel Coalition talk which in turn tried neither to romanticize contemporary urban mobility nor simply decry it. Stephen wisely thought about both the dangers (idolatries) and the opportunities (blessings) of urban mobility. The primary opportunity is that urban dwellers are more open to new churches and to new religious encounters. Looking at the dangers, Stephen pointed at the well known suspects of autonomy and escapism. Mobility introduces a certain quality of life that reinforces a willingness to new encounters but not necessarily encounters that have a deep impact. At least not necessarily.
This led me to recall the massive survey of religion in American life by the Pew Forum on Religion (Landscape Survey, Feb-June 2008). It looked at church mobility and its primary conclusion was that church commitment sits lightly on those who attend church. The study told us that Americans shop for church as they might shop for groceries. This is the very reason Stephen was right to point at the often unseen opportunity for new churches in urban contexts where “choices” are not defined by prior religious commitments. People are not constrained in looking around for a church by their prior church attendance elsewhere. The danger is that their choices take on a life of their own and become more dominant than the churches chosen. This is the downside of urban mobility. Peter Berger introduced us to this phenomena nearly thirty years ago and called it the “heretical imperative”. He said that when religious conviction is chosen as one might choose any other commodity, it generally ceases to have much traction in people’s lives. It ceases to be an integrating center for them and increasingly notions of orthodoxy prove problematic. This is the “heretical” part of Berger’s “Heretical Imperative”. And most of us can well attest that notions of “orthodoxy” run against the grain of the experience of even many church going folk today. They may “like” their church experience, but they are loath to speak of that experience in terms of “right and wrong”. I’m often amazed in addition that “church choosers” have very strong opinions about church, but these strong opinions do not translate into notions of orthodoxy. One may have strong opinions about the kind of yogurt one likes, but it would seem odd to them to speak of orthodox yogurts.
We know that church attendance in the U.S. has remained relatively stable over the last two decades. We may sense our era as being “post-Christian” but it is not because there are less people in church. Maybe its because church attendance means something quite different to contemporary people than it has previously. Going to church does not have the cash value for people of a life long commitment. People change churches and change church traditions with alarming regularity today. For many there is no enduring place in their lives for a church tradition since they move so fluidly across traditions. The Pew Survey noticed how frequently people married across traditions, how frequently people migrated across traditions of church membership, and how frequently people trained their children in multiple religious traditions. Nearly half of adults in the U.S. have switched to a faith other than the one in which they were raised according to the Survey. Whatever else may be said, brand loyalty appears to be diminishing by the day.
However, these are trends, and churches ought to be aware of them but ought not be defeated by them. In my next blog I want to think about some of the strategies churches use to situate people into enduring communities, and the manner in which those communities endure not by shouting louder, nor by becoming more insular – but rather by becoming more irenically theological. Next time...
The Center for Gospel Culture exists to establish the centrality of the gospel as the basis for developing a gospel culture worldview in renewing every dimension of an individual's life, so that individuals would be able to think, act, and live in line with the truth of the gospel.
