I became a Christian during summer camp at age eleven, and few experiences since then can compare to the bliss of that first night and the month or so following it. I still remember, though distantly, the thrill of morning devotionals and a general sense of wonder at the strange, unmapped new territory of Christianity.
Walker Percy wrote that every explorer names his island Formosa, “beautiful”, and such Christianity was to me. After a time, however, I started hearing an internal voice, one that said, roughly, why do morning devotionals for ten minutes – you could do them for thirty. So I did, and the voice quieted, but after several weeks another took its place: you play video games for several hours a day – there are service opportunities out there. When friends started drinking, part of me welcomed the change, because the loudest missive from conscience was telling me not to drink alcohol, and I obeyed. But the more I applied myself, the more the voices proliferated: a fountain soda?! – that could be two dollars spent toward fighting human trafficking.
All these voices were really one and the same, something along the lines of me still being a sinner and having so much more of the Gospel to live out. Formosa was losing its allure, and the horizon of feeling morally at peace receded the more I moved toward it. Eventually, a move toward agnosticism (“none of it matters!”) or more likely Eastern Orthodoxy (icons! mystery!) would have been inevitable. But one voice is easier to deal with than hundreds, and the most merciful thing you can tell someone chasing a rainbow is that he’ll never reach it – even if he likely won’t listen. The reduction, or leading-back, from infinite possible moral tasks to one impossible task – “be perfect” – was the only thing that could’ve helped, and increased peace quickly followed my newfound impasse.
There are other ways to silence the voices of condemnation, more salutary perhaps than burnout. I once participated in a Bible study in which, during a Romans 7 discussion, five out of the six people gathered said they had never deliberately sinned since converting to Christianity. I recall the sixth person asking whether, for example, the time they spent at the gym might be better used doing community service. Immediately, one of the well-versed five responded that food is good, and God wants us to enjoy it. Acquaintance with recent pop theology had allowed him, unwittingly, to dull the Law’s force.
Why did Jesus preach the Sermon on the Mount? Especially the parts about anger making me a murderer and lust making me an adulterer – the Jewish Law seems to have covered all that pretty thoroughly. Did his audience need to hear the Law again; were they unfamiliar with the Hebrew Scriptures? Or perhaps they needed, like me, a reduction from the many voices to the one: “be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect.”
The Law is holy and just and good, as St. Paul affirms, but in practice, humans misuse it. The Law condemns us, as it should, on paper. But in practice, stringent morality can serve as a perverse comfort, a balm to the Adamic ego. Learning ethics back-to-front, for the idealist, allows us to better keep God’s command. For the realist, however, it merely provides the Old Adam with an expanded arsenal for self-justification.
One of my friends participated in a small group during college. Going into his third year in the group, everyone decided they should sign a group pledge not to get drunk, ever. It turned out that contemplative prayer, reading the Bible, and service were less important than continual moderation with alcohol. Not to mention moderation being more important than avoiding envy, lust, resentment, and contempt.
Not more important – few would actually say that – but more pressing, seemingly. The reason? Behaviors are more easily controlled than dispositions. If there is a requirement, we would usually rather it be a trivial-but-controllable one than be an amorphous one, one which constantly condemns us. Saul Bellow wrote that “Where a fellow draws a battle line there he is apt to be found, dead.” It’s easy to give a reason – because any standard will ultimately condemn us – but the more insidious danger is that we will draw a line which places us in the right, a distortion and minimization of the Law for the sake of self-affirmation.
Often those who are criticized for being antinomian are those who have taken the Law’s condemning totality so seriously that these minute boundaries, while not losing their reality, fade: an inexperienced literature student will think his two favorite books are massively important; while losing none of their real value, they nonetheless shrink in importance as he reads more. Thus Jesus, the only human ever to know the Law fully by obedience, could say, from his vantage point, “’whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” He took our hair-splitting and deconstructed it, utterly.
From a birds-eye perspective, which is to say an accurate one, perhaps the distinctions between a theology of breast-beating – “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” – versus one of line-drawing – “I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers” – blend together, too. God knows that humility and moral defeatism can become ladder-climbing techniques themselves. From such a perspective, we’re all revealed to be narcissists, and the differences small.
Our absolute spiritual need (the only source of true humility) cannot be conjured, exhorted, or theologized into. Resisting that need, we can do nothing but draw Bellow’s battle lines, and he’s right to observe that there we will be found, dead. Fortunately, the spiritually dead, biblically speaking, are the genuine substrates of redemption.
COMMENTS
18 responses to “Christian Battle Lines and the Narcissism of Small Differences”
Leave a Reply
Thanks for this great post. Although I became a Christian at about age 12, I very quickly became tired of the constant psychological manipulation that was designed to induce constant self-examination and guilt-tripping that even today is characteristic of many generically evangelical Christian groups. This kind of manufactured guilt felt very different to me from the real guilt that I felt from doing and thinking things that were, in fact, bad. Those I could confess and be forgiven for…the fake guilt that accompanied the fake demands (read you Bible, do your daily devotional, win the world for Jesus, etc.) could never be assuaged. Francis Schaeffer wrote that there are two ways to deny Biblical absolutes (i.e. God’s law): one is to quibble with the Biblical absolute, the other is to make up demands and treat them as absolutes that are not absolutes. For the real sin, there is real forgiveness through the Cross; for the made up demands, the real God frees us to say to hell with them.
Nice.
Such a good, timely piece. Thank you Will.
Loved the line about chasing rainbows. Speaking of Percy are any ‘birders flocking to the Percy festival in St. Francisville, LA this weekend?
But the problem is not about guilt and law/gospel, but by thinking that even the little goods entitle us to any standing!
The problem is radical sickness and there are those who accept and those who deny, and live in a false reality. That can take the form of despair or of arrogance. But the error is they’ve set their eyes on something else altogether!
The Apostles are explicit that we grow into our imitation of Christ, and Christ is explicit that lest we obey Him, we know Him not. Those words of judgment are to put to death our moralisms, which Lutheran law/gospel is the flip side of Roman sacramental ladder climbing.
“Be perfect” actually has a context, and Jesus did not get off the mount in a cloud of dread.
I have a tendency of making “taking the law seriously enough” into a new law. I feel like one should have to in a way “earn” freedom from living life in relation to law by taking the law seriously enough and being bothered by their sin sufficiently enough. This causes me to always wonder “Have I been sufficiently ‘killed’ by the law — is it time for grace for me”, which of course quickly becomes a law itself. Yet if this “law” was not there, then people who don’t really take the law or their sin that seriously would be “allowed” to nevertheless be at peace, which doesn’t really seem right to me. Is one “allowed” to simply rest in grace no matter where they fall on this scale of “taking the law or their sin seriously”?
Thoughts, Will?
Hey Kory,
I certainly sympathize with you on such seriousness becoming a new law. I like Luther’s “verbum externum” idea about the Word, which can be read as a word spoken to us rather than something we tell ourselves. Maybe it’s the preacher’s job to give the Law before the Gospel? Of course, that can get hairy, and I would imagine it takes a really sharp instinct (and a genuinely loving person) to do that properly. And sometimes, grace precedes recognition of sin (https://mbird.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/02/green-river-killer-and-bearded-old-man/)
Cal, I agree that such a focus can lead to either despair or arrogance, but I don’t think the Lutheran framework has to live in that dichotomy. Perhaps the ways we’re brought into imitation and obedience can be experienced law/gospel, consolation and desolation. Or you could take a more E Orthodox stance – for that, I’d defer to Tuomo Mannermaa’s work in trying to bridge Lutheranism and Orthodoxy.
Good writing man as usual. Though it’s hard to believe that those accused of being antinomians are often the ones who take the law most seriously. I see what you’re getting at with the whole ‘be perfect’ thing, but Christ’s own summation of the law does not quite do what yours does. When he’s asked to sum up the law, he’s much more practical than that: “Love God and neighbor.” And Paul seems to be on much the same page as Jesus in this practical nature of the law. As he makes clear in Galatians, the law is not so much something to be ‘believed’ as something to be ‘done’. It is not an object of faith but of obedience (Gal. 3:12). i.e. One ‘takes it seriously’ by doing it, not merely by giving it a high theological/theoretical status. Show me the Christian accused of antinomianism who also takes the law seriously in this way and I’ll take your point. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find that person.
I’m with Sam. I’ve long since left the moralism of my early fundamentalism, but now and then I try to take a good look at my life and ask fairly simple questions — have I gone out of my way on anyone else’s behalf lately? In my antinomian moments, I don’t want to be bothered by the question. I’m busy acquiring beautiful music, fascinating books, interesting theological ideas.
Maybe Kierkegaard is helpful here. Neither the aesthetic nor the ethical are in fact the religious life.
Hi Sam and Tracy, Surprise, you’re a fallen sinner. Who Knew? I think what Will is saying (and obviously I would love to hear his thoughts on my thoughts) is not that all people being accused of antinomianism should not be, but that many who are accused are also the same people who are accused of preaching Grace too much (justification) and not enough works or obedience (sanctification). I think Will’s point is that we always want to focus on what we need to do to please God, when what God really wants is for us to just stop focusing on our performance and look to him and everything that he has graciously given us in grace through faith.
I think Will’s point about alleged antinomians being the one’s who take the law too seriously is that when we finally realize just how impossible it is to keep even a smidgen of the law we realize why Grace is so important. These accused have such a high opinion of the law because they know they have absolutely no chance of ever coming close to satisfying “be perfect”. So with that understanding of just how important the law is comes the understanding of just how amazing, undeserving, and radical the free gift of grace actually is. One who has some earthly delusion that they can actually satisfy any portion of the law, (the point of the Sermon on the Mount) actually has a low view of the law because they think they might be able to pull it off when God wants us to understand we have no chance. We need to rely on him and him alone.
I truly believe that when we are struck with the amazing reality of his gracious gift we can do nothing less than act as examples of Christ and his loving, giving nature. He just wants us to love and trust him. He knows we can’t do it fully and completely. That’s the whole purpose of Grace in the first place. Quit worrying about what you/we need to be doing for God. Ultimately the only way we can please him is to believe in the one whom he has sent. Remember Jesus is the only one who actually pleases God. The pleasing that we do, if any, is ultimately through faith in Christ, the one is does the pleasing.
Rick, I love your emphases for the most part, and appreciate how you’ve taken a bit of the ‘edge’ out of the argument and retained the main point. 100% agree that human beings cannot even begin to obey the law of our own accord, and that our need, exposed by the law, leads us to grace. But I think you might have missed the nuance of the disagreement. In no way did I take Will to be wholesale defending antinomianism or all those accused of it. Rather, the point that concerns me is this notion that one really only takes the law (and the grace of God, for that matter) seriously by accepting theologically/theoretically that (even as a Christian) one cannot obey any part of it, and therefore might as well (or must!) cease trying. To me, such a notion wouldn’t be even vaguely comprehensible to the biblical writers. Because, as I was saying, according to Paul and Jesus (and Deuteronomy) the law is not a thing to be assessed theoretically but to be attempted/obeyed. That is its function. One cannot ‘understand’ and form a ‘doctrine’ of the law in any sense that he or she has not tried to obey what it commands. That’s why Paul the Pharisee and Martin Luther were both so good at assessing the purpose and shortcomings of the law. Because their own conscious helplessness in the face of the law was gained by their efforts to obey it. But I wonder if some forms of law/gospel theology have fallen into oversimplification and misunderstanding about law and grace precisely because they no longer hear the law as a command but merely as a theory or phenomenon.
Think about it. How could ‘seriousness’ about the law be gained any other way than by receiving it as a real command and trying to obey it? Why does every New Testament author unswervingly continue to hurl commands on believers, even after the redemptive work of Christ has been completed? Why didn’t they just give them the much more straightforward theory that we in the law/gospel world have grown so accustomed to? Why all the commands to do this and not that and this and not that if the goal was merely to train believers to throw all of those diverse commands in one big abstract box labeled ‘perfect impossibility’ and give up personally trying to obey any part of it? What if the biblical writers believed that faith and understanding is gained, at least partially, through the struggle? What if the commands were given at least partially so that believers would keep on struggling to do what they had been called by God to do (just as Paul says of himself so often) and, in so doing, find that it was only His energy and His spirit that would suffice to get the job done (just as Paul also says).
In my view we’ve got to think twice before concluding that ‘the point of Sermon on the Mount’ is simply to free us from our ‘earthly delusion that we can actually satisfy any portion of the law’. (1) Because it effectively strips the Sermon on the Mount of its actual content, and with it, all its beauty, goodness, and yes, grace, which itself is not simply a theological/theoretical idea but a real concrete thing that exists in the world and in us, thanks be to God. And (2) because if we, God forbid, begin to train Christians to sum up everything they are commanded by Jesus to do simply as ‘be perfect’, i.e. ‘do the impossible’, i.e. ‘don’t worry about it because you can’t do it, and just depend on grace’, there may in the end be no real experience or understanding of grace to depend on. Only a decoy.
And all this is not to mention the possibility that the Holy Spirit is actually real and we actually CAN begin to hear and obey the Sermon on the Mount and the rest of the New Testament commands, as we struggle with all his energy which so powerfully works within us (again, Paul’s words). But I’ll stop there for now.
Hi Sam, I’ll be brief. I don’t think Will meant for us to stop trying and to give up. And I don’t believe that anyone who has been truly touched by the Grace of God would ever even think in the way you are describing. The reaction is just the opposite…. to do all you can for others. I think Will’s point is that satisfying the command to be perfect is impossible without Jesus. That’s all.
Rick, again, I appreciate your desire to simplify the issue. Yet, of course, if the only thing being argued is that we cannot be perfect without Jesus, you’d be hard-pressed to find any Christian of any background in all the world that would disagree. I understood Will to be saying something a bit more controversial than simply that, regarding the nature of the law and of grace. That’s why I commented – thought I’d join the controversy! But if all we’re saying is that we can’t be perfect without Jesus, then we can all agree to agree.
I guess I didn’t get the same interpretation from Will’s article that you did, but I think it’s so valuable to air our views through these types forums, and they don’t degenerate down to the anger and frustration we so often see. And I also think, as you lastly stated, we can both happily agree that Jesus always gets the last word.
Amen! Well said.