Just Church (13)

This week, we’re continuing our discussion of guilt. It’s a key tool being used today by the Woke Left to bludgeon Christians into cooperation with the leftist agenda, and bring that agenda into the church. The Christian recognition of human guilt is leveraged to induce a heightened and unwarranted anxiety about us becoming seen as narrow, discriminatory, unfair, or racially insensitive. In this state, we become vulnerable to the recommendations of seemingly-nice false teachers who claim to lead the way to greater justice and fairness in church life.

Let’s unpack those tactics. We might ask, “Why is guilt such an effective weapon against society in the present moment?” and “How is it even more effective as a weapon against the church?” That’s what we’ll cover this week: and next week, we’ll complete the picture by showing how the kind of guilt we are being invited to experience today is unlike godly guilt and repentance, so we can recognize it for what it is — a strategy of the enemy intended to disorient, fragment and demoralize our people, and thus to render them pliable to an ungodly agenda.

We begin with the observation that an awful lot of people in our society seem to be feeling guilty about all kinds of things. Issues that haven’t really bothered us before are suddenly being brought into the public conversation, and everybody’s just a little nervous about being accused of things like racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia ... or just narrowness, lack of openness, refusal to change, conservatism ... Somehow, we’re all feeling the pinch a little bit, even when we know nothing at all against ourselves. We’re all just a little nervous.

Chapter 4: What Social Justice Does to the Fellowship (continued)

Causes

1/ Post-Protestant Sensibilities

Part of the answer as to why this is happening has to be the over-tender conscience of the Western person. North America in particular is a kind of post-Protestant culture, one whose moral sensibilities were originally formed along Christian lines, even if the particular beliefs that gave rise to that public morality have been long abandoned. It’s not so long ago in North America that most people went to church of some kind, all Christian holidays were public holidays, playgrounds and businesses closed on Sunday, and students in public schools were charged with reciting the Lord’s Prayer every morning in unison. A sort of vague public morality, something like what John Dewey famously called the “Judeo-Christian consensus” persisted long after many North Americans had abandoned such practices.

2/ Belief in Equality

One of the longest-persisting beliefs in North American societies has been the conviction that all men are essentially equal, created by God and endowed by him with particular rights and a common value; and it’s this deep belief that doomed historical slavery and historical racism. Not only in view of history but because of this background in Christian morality, North Americans have remained sensitive to injustice to a degree not found in much of the world. Try selling non-racism to Greeks and Macedonians, or to Arabs regarding Jews. Try selling women’s rights in Saudi Arabia or Somalia. Try selling universal human rights in China or North Korea. Or try finding any time in history when there has been more equality and opportunity for people of various “colors” in North America. By any reasonable metric, racism and discrimination are losing in the West.

3/ Conscience without Forgiveness

But ironically, since it is also in the West that consciences are most tender to human rights and justice issues, it is there that the guilt associated with these things has been ramped up to hyper-vigilance levels. Part of the problem is that a sharp conscience without any hope of forgiveness and salvation is a very bad thing; and it’s a thing that can be taken hostage by neo-Marxist Social Justice propagandists. So we have never had so little reason for self-recriminations, but never such a high public feeling of guilt and shame.

Christians are not immune to such strategies.

Hyper-Guilt

Christians are people who can be hyper-vigilant to guilt.

What that means is that we have had an encounter with guilt of which the world knows nothing — and it’s been traumatic, transformative and soul-deep, resulting in a perspective on sin that no unbeliever can even fathom, let alone experience. We’ve been disabused of the illusions upon which secular man founds his self-confidence: illusions such as “The world’s not such a bad place”, “I’m basically a good chap”, or “Whatever evil may exist out there, it need not affect me.” We’ve been freed from such delusions; but the tearing away from those security blankets has not been an entirely pain-free process.

Think about this: we become Christians in the first place by realizing that we are sinners. A sharp, present sense of our guiltiness before God is one of the things that drives us toward Christ; and that sense is only magnified as we realize more and more how far from his righteousness we are. In our minds, the holiness of God becomes a permanent contrast to our own moral condition.

Then, as we continue in the Christian life, the distance between our best efforts to please God and our ongoing status as redeemed sinners in a fallen world becomes more and more apparent. Every time we try and fail to live up to our high calling, we are reminded that only by the ongoing intervention of the Spirit of God are we of any use to God at all.

This is grace. This is salvation. It is humbling. While the Christian no longer fears the judgment of God against his sin, in his own daily experience he is constantly made conscious that he is the beneficiary of divine mercy on that score, not of deserved privilege.

Guilt, Gratitude and Action

But in the Christian, guilt does not remain. This is what it means to be freed from sin: not to obsess over it or be reminded of it constantly, but rather to convert an awareness of our forgiveness into gratitude. We are thankful that the Lord has been so kind to us, who are undeserving of the least of his mercies. His word constantly reminds us not to forget how much we owe, and to treat others according to the way we have been treated by God.

So then, gratitude is further converted into practical action. Christians are called to respond gratefully and extend forgiveness, healing and blessing to others. This Christians have done, through literally becoming the most charitable people in history, performing innumerable practical works of kindness and mercy in the Lord’s name.

All that is biblical. What’s not biblical, though, is what many Christians who are immature and untaught experience: namely, that having been saved, they are not clear on how forgiven they are, or what “as far as the east is from the west” means in relation to their sin and God. Technically, they believe they are forgiven. If you asked them what the Bible says about that, they can tell you. However, they do not feel guiltless, so they set out to please God as a way of stopping the feelings. Of course, that never works. So they move from strategy to strategy and from action to action, in a vain effort to find something that will work; but only a deep, committed faith in Christ as the total, sufficient answer to all sin can actually put an end to those feelings.

Second-Guessing Self

Maybe you’ve had that experience, too. It’s when you get saved, but then second-guess yourself: did I really mean it? Did I repent enough? Can God really forgive me for the hidden things I know I have done? Or will I find that salvation is just not enough for me? To a certain extent, this kind of questioning is natural, and is our incentive to study further and find out the truth about the meaning of salvation. When we do, what we find out is this: that our salvation is not grounded in what have been or are at all. It’s grounded in the love the Father has for the Son. Having given up his precious Son for us, he will not leave us without complete discharge of culpability, full adoption, full cleansing, the indwelling of his Spirit (our seal and guarantee of salvation), complete salvation, complete hope and complete predestination for glory. When we finally get that — that in us dwells no good thing, but in him, the fullness of divine salvation dwells, and we are “in him” — then we have freedom from guilt and shame, and gratefully launch out in confident service in his kingdom.

For a Christian, the fact of his sinfulness, his fallibility is an inducement to humility. It is also intended to keep him humble and teach him to be merciful with the errors of others. In this sense, a keen awareness of guilt is a Christian’s companion through life.

The Sin-Detecting Sensor

It’s not that he feels keenly his own guilt — there’s nothing Christian about doing that, because Christ has already dealt with sin — but rather that he has already been disabused of the world’s illusions about guilt. He often experiences the effects of recognizing again his own fallibility, needing to confess it, repenting, and moving in a better direction. Legitimate guilt reappears periodically in the Christian’s life, not to plunge him into misery but to alert him to wrongdoing, and to encourage him to fix things. This is all good. It’s a case of God converting what is for the world a bad thing (guilt) from a condemnation into a blessing. Conscience becomes a sin-detecting sensor to enable the Christian to navigate in a morally corrupt world.

Consequently, the healthy Christian is much more practiced and less reluctant than the world is to realize he’s been wrong, and then to do something about that. He is no longer fooled by the preening of his internal pride, nor impressed with the moral blandishments of the world that encourage men to deny and bury their guilt because nothing can be done about it. He knows what sin is, how bad it is, and how capable he is, in himself, of participating with it in evil. If the sting of guilt is blunted for him, still his awareness and understanding of it is refined and sharpened to a steely point. He recognizes it more quickly than the world does, both in himself and in those around him.