Discussion Grounds

Good morning, Luke!

We have an extra hour given to us this morning (in the United States, that is) by the switch back to standard time, so it’s a good opportunity for me to check in here. Do you still live in MInnesota, by the way? I have family living about 35-40 miles south of your original home town of Cambridge—they’re in Circle Pines. (My home is in Yorktown, Virginia, which you probably already know from looking through my blog.)

Looking at your story here and on your blog, I wonder how accurate it is when you say you had a similar experience to mine. On your blog you summarize your growing-up years,

In many ways I regret my Christian upbringing. So much time and energy wasted on an invisible friend. So many bad lessons about morality, thinking, and sex. So much needless guilt.

And here you say,

Falling in love with God that way, wrote Willard, is a matter of spiritual discipline. The discipline that worked best for me was to remind myself every 30 seconds throughout each day of all the wonderful gifts God had given me – green trees, blue lakes, creature comforts, intelligence, a strong family, and so on. Once I started doing that, my Christian life became much easier. And yes, “the sky was bluer and the grass was greener the next day.” So I think I can identify with your experience!

To me that sounds an awful lot like my experience before I entered into a personal relationship with Christ. The change that I experienced was not from doing anything at all, except trusting Jesus Christ. It was most undoubtedly an inward transformation accomplished by God doing something in me. It wasn’t about resolving to change my ways, or even about resolving to be more aware of God and his goodness. It was a gift, not a discipline.

I won’t try to guess what “bad lessons” you were taught about morality, thinking, and sex, but “needless guilt” sounds very familiar, in the sense that earlier in my life I had a moral sense, which often led to awareness of moral failure, and I didn’t know what to do with that guilt. This is inevitable for anyone who has a moral sense at all, regardless of the content of that moral sense. You and I, neither of us being psychopaths lacking in all moral sense, were both bound to feel failure and guilt.

So what’s the solution to guilt? I can think of four or five potential options:

1. Adjusting moral beliefs to match behavior. If you paint the target around the arrow after you’ve shot it at the wall, you can never miss! This is a version of moral relativism (there are New Age variants that approach this too), and since neither of us is a relativist I don’t need to spend time on what’s wrong with that approach.
2. Nihilism or some version thereof, which gives up and says none of this matters. Neither of us are nihilists, either.
3. Trying a lot harder to do right until one finally succeeds. The severe problem with that is that no one ever finally succeeds in consistently doing what they really think is right.
4. Accepting moral realism without responsibility to a transcendent God, which I think might give one freedom to say, “Okay, I’m not perfect, but I’m doing the best I can, trying to grow, and what more can you expect?”
5. Forgiveness from God, living by his grace, and growing in character by the power of his inward working.

Based on the clues and hints in what you wrote, it sounds to me like possibly you grew up with a list of “Christian” do’s and don’ts, so thus you experienced a lot of what you now describe as needless guilt. Based on Willard’s book, you resolved to remind yourself every half-minute or so of God’s goodness, an approach with corresponds more or less with number 3: trying harder to do right. I think Divine Conspiracy is a truly great book, but there is a “map vs. fuel” distinction to be made.¹ The disciplines are not the way out of guilt; they are for those who know that God has already provided that solution through his grace.

In other words, it sounds to me like the Christianity you say you tried and rejected is a lot like the “Christianity” I previously tried and rejected, too.

I have things to say about the rest of your most recent letter, but in this one I have taking a dangerous risk of running with some hints and clues, and I might have gone the right direction or the wrong one. It sounds to me like now you are living with solution number 4 to your previous and/or current potential guilt. My inferences might be all wrong, though, so before bumbling on ahead with possibly wrong assumptions, I’d like to get your response to this much.

I trust you can see why this matters. If you think the Christianity you have rejected is the same as the Christianity I’m defending, when in fact it has much in common with a “Christianity” that I have also rejected, it would be important to bring that to light as early as possible.

1. The map/fuel problem applies to anyone who is trying harder to be or do better as a Christian, whether they have encountered Christ in a relational way already or not. [↩]