What Does Your Proof Text Prove? (33)

Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason is trying to clear up confusion on the subject of humility in a recent post.

He’s responding to a preacher’s comment that “Humility is the one virtue that if you think you have it, you don’t.” He thinks that’s a mistaken notion, in that it’s both disheartening and textually inaccurate.

Let’s see if Greg’s reasoning stands up …

Virtue Enjoyed in the Present

First, Greg writes:

“Any virtue — including humility — is something meant to be enjoyed in the present by the person who practices it.”

I don’t necessarily disagree with that, though the saying that “virtue is its own reward” is usually attributed to John Henry Newman rather than one of the apostles. However, even if the Lord intended the practice of virtue to be “appropriately self-satisfying”, as Greg puts it, it does not follow that exercise of virtue need always be deliberate or conscious, or that it ought to be.

Think about the scriptural difference between legalism and love. A legalistic mindset does the right thing because it is the right thing, because scripture requires it or in fear of divine reprisal. A more messed-up legalistic mindset does the right thing in order to feel superior or satisfactorily religious. A loving person, on the other hand, does the right thing because he or she is full of compassion, affection or desire for the good of someone else. Love’s occupation is the person in need, not the ticking of the humility box. Paul’s occupation in Romans 13 is not to teach the Romans to practice virtue for the sake of generating appropriate self-satisfaction, but to “love your neighbor as yourself”. Love is the fulfilling of the law, preferably without thinking of it as law at all. Love acts virtuously and enjoys the result of being virtuous without being overly conscious about what feelings are generated in the process, let alone seeking them out. Any satisfaction that comes about is a by-product of love rather than a cultivated characteristic of virtuous behavior. In fact, if behaving virtuously made you utterly miserable, it would remain the loving thing to do.

Christian living is about love, and love is unselfconscious. When love is operating most biblically, it will be most occupied with its object. Any sense that a loving act “felt good” is really an afterthought.

Modeling Humility

Second, Greg points to the fact that Jesus and Paul drew attention to their own humility — he quotes Matthew 11:29 and Acts 20:19 in support of this — the implication being that conscious humility is preferable to instinctive humility.

Again, this does not necessarily follow. Paul was deliberately and consciously modeling humility because he was in the process of teaching it to the elders at Ephesus. He wanted them to follow the pattern he was living out, and merely commanding humility in an information vacuum is much less effective than saying, “This is what humility looks like in action. Do that.” Moreover, when the Lord Jesus says, “I am gentle and lowly in heart”, his point is that he is the sort of person to whom you can come to find rest for your soul. He is trying to make the overburdened sinner comfortable with trusting him.

Both were aware that their behavior was humble, but their concern was what that humility could do for others, not the “appropriate self-satisfaction” that may come along with it.

Don’t get me wrong: Greg has lots of useful things to say about humility and the service of others, like that humility is not self-deprecation or a sense of spiritual inferiority. This is certainly true and important to remember. I just don’t think he’s demonstrated from scripture that conscious humility is always preferable to unconscious humility.

Virtue and Spiritual Muscle Memory

I used to work on a typesetting system that had all kinds of shortcuts — key combinations like “shift-control-delete” that enabled the typist to perform a function quicker than accessing a drop-down menu. Over time, I became so used to the shortcuts that I was no longer consciously aware of which key combinations to hit. My fingers performed those operations automatically while I was engaged in thinking of other things. When I tried to teach the key combinations to new typesetters, the only way I could do it was by putting my hands on the keyboard and then looking at my fingers to see which keys they instinctively hit.

I believe humility operates most effectively through the spiritual equivalent of muscle memory. It’s not that the humble man doesn’t understand what humility is or that he is behaving humbly, it’s more like he just doesn’t think about his own thought processes and motivations at all. Like the apostle Paul, he does not even judge himself. The virtue of humility is rewarding, of course, but the reward you receive is not a greater awareness of your own virtue or a sense of increasing Christ-likeness, but rather the delight of having been of service to someone else.

So then, there are times — teaching moments — when conscious, deliberate humility is a useful thing. New Christians practicing virtues like humility for the first time in their lives really have no other option than to say to themselves, “Oh, I’d better be humble now. The Lord would like that.” Virtue has to be cultivated when it’s a new thing. All the same, with sufficient practice, virtues like humility can and should be mostly automatic.