When I was much younger and only beginning to really explore the Christian faith, I remember creating an abridged version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Strongly reformed, even the 1962 Canadian version of the standard prayer book for Anglicans bore strong overtones of the reformation that gave voice to the original prayer books of King Edward 480 odd years ago.

In my youthful exuberance to critique what I saw as an outdated and largely unhelpful faith that I was raised with, I and some friends created an “abridged” version of the book, in hopes of getting a few laughs and impressing the minister’s daughter. It read something like this (this was more than 25 years ago):

“Dear God, we’re really really bad, please forgive us, even though we suck, because of Jesus, Amen.”

Steve Dawe Authorized recollection, Canadian Book of Common Prayer (abridged)

Now, way back then, I thought I had levelled the most amazing and witty critique of the faith of my fathers possible. I believed I was brilliant in only the way a late teenager with a few months of university education could. Even then, I knew that the sentiment I was summarizing from the BCP was out of keeping with what modern enlightened people understood.

Flash forward to just this morning, when I read the news that former Christian leader Joshua Harris announced that he no longer considered himself a Christian. To be honest, I’m not near enough the guy to comment on it, but one phrase in his missive struck me with the memory of my youthful critique of several thousand years of Christian theology. He said “I am learning that no group has the market cornered on grace”.

I’m glad I learned that one a few years before Harris. You see, I had no problem with the Christian idea of grace, even in my mostly pre-Christian days. The unmerited favour of God has never really caused me issues, and I have come to love it even more as I’ve been led to embrace what the reformed wing of Christianity (of which Harris was a leader) has called “the doctrines of Grace”. In fact, now that I think about it, as someone living in the modern west, I live in a culture based on the grace of people around me (at least for the moment).

While law and order ostensibly keep the peace, most of the goodness done to me day in and day out is because of the civil niceness that we as a society give to one another (law being the last resort when civility fails). We function by showing favour to one another, and I have done nothing to merit the favour paid to me. Grace (unmerited favour) is part of the assumed grounding of the culture I am a part of. Thus it shouldn’t be surprising that we see a lot of it in the world around us, and that no group has the market cornered on it.

No, the scandal of Christianity is that we believe not merely in Grace, but also in mercy. Mercy here is defined as the way in which those who have every right to treat us poorly don’t, and instead treat us with the unmerited favour (grace) listed above. To accept grace makes no claims about the person receiving the grace, save that I have no right to the goodness being offered me. To accept mercy however is to accept also that what I really deserve from those being kind to me is their wrath.

That is hard to accept on a few levels, especially in a culture like ours, based so fundamentally on unmerited goodness being shown to one another. In the first place, it means that we don’t have a right to good things being done for us (hard, when we’re so used to it, we think that people being civil to us is our right). In the second place, it means that bad things should properly receive bad responses; if I am bad to someone else, I can (and should) expect some level of opposition in response. Finally, and most importantly, it means that I’m not fundamentally a good person. Even those of us who claim Christ are not better in any real sense (even as we are being sanctified by the work of God, who changed us to desire God instead of desiring evil), rather we are objects of God’s mercy; a mercy we need to show to others.

Christians, as much as anybody else, muck this up. This is where we get the self-righteousness that so often plagues Christian Churches. Mercy being the most heinous ideas to the self righteous. Unlike grace, mercy is a reminder of how we are not better than those we seek to castigate, merely different. Mercy means that there is a standard of goodness that we not only do not meet, but actively work against. Mercy means that I cannot look to other sinners, even the unrepentant ones, and think them more horrible than me. God saved me when I was His enemy and had only the right to expect His punishment.

As with most things, God puts this better than I can in His book (here written through the Apostle Paul:

⁶ For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— ⁸ but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ⁹ Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. ¹⁰ For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. ¹¹ More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. 

Romans 5:6-11, ESV

I’m really really bad, and God forgives me because of Jesus, and I can know He forgives me because of Jesus, and now I can enjoy His unmerited favour (Grace) with no fear, and show both mercy and grace to those who do me wrong, even as I seek to show grace to all.

With me facing ordination this Sunday, I wanted to make available to any who were interested, what it is I claim to believe. With that in mind, here is my statement of faith.

Statement of Faith

I know it’s strange to say this: but I really don’t like how some people are nice to me in traffic. It isn’t everything nice that people do, but today when I was trying to turn left from a busy street into a bookstore parking lot in the city I live in, someone on the inside lane decided they’d be nice and stopped to let me out. The problem? He didn’t seem to notice the string of traffic coming up beside him on the other side at full speed, and had I not been looking behind his remarkable over-large truck, I wouldn’t have seen them. Had I turned just then, trusting in the goodwill of the person being nice, I’d have had a very bad day (though I guess, given the speed of some of those other cars, I might have gotten to see Jesus today).

My mom would have said that he had his heart in the right place, meaning that it was good that the man showed me compassion in my (very light) need. Unfortunately, I’m not so sure that’s true. In fact, I’m relatively sure his heart was in precisely the wrong place. Namely, I think that his heart was doing the job his head should have been doing, and were I to rely on his kindness, it would have been to my detriment.

This seems to be a more general problem than among drivers in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I think this is the reason that so many of us Christians try to do nice things that end up doing more harm than good. Of course, we have compassion, and compassion is a good thing, but only when it translates into actions really aimed at the other person’s good, and given the human mind’s habit for self-deception (see Jeremiah 17:9), this has to be examined carefully.

For example, how often do we end up being like an example in the book “When Helping Hurts”,

A really good book on the topic. The authors walk the reader through the ways in which we can think we’re helping when really we’re hurting both the recipient and ourselves.

and give people gifts that help immediately, but end up deriding the people we show the charity to, and create a culture of dependence in the person we do nice things for? How often do we end up giving the single mom’s kids gifts in a way that makes the kids thank us, but learn that their mom can’t provide, and they should be looking to other people for provision? Or expect the single mom to be suitably grateful instead of helping because we care for them?

When I help people, I need to be careful that I’m actually helping instead of just getting rid of my bad feelings. I need to
be careful that my help doesn’t end in a wreck for other people, even as I end up feeling better about myself. The simple fact is that facile help doesn’t always help, and sometimes we need to think deeply about people in order to properly help them. It may mean we need to get closer. It may mean we need to learn some uncomfortable truths about our society and the way it treats people, it may even mean that we look like terrible people for a time in order that we provide real lasting help to people.

Quite simply while we must have compassion for those around us, our compassion must be guided by wisdom and knowledge.

Our hearts must be in the right place: guided by our heads.

In my last post, I talked about how I now believe that Paul’s view of the Christian mind, as shown in Romans 12:1-3 is a fundamental alteration in the way a Christian processes their world and their place in it. It isn’t simply that we exchange a “worldly” set of opinions for a “Christian” one.From this, there’s a raft of interesting (and slightly controversial) implications for thinking this way. I’m going to deal with one of those today.When I was much younger, I had an image of Christian evangelism that could most easily be likened to the Church as a fortified camp which, from time to time, sent out raiding parties into the world to bring people into the camp to become Christians like us. Of course, this is a fairly pejorative image, and coming from how I understand the Christian walk now, it’s flatly unhelpful. It comes from the idea that the difference between Christians and the non-Christian is merely a surface set of opinions, and if we take them from the world made up of worldly surface opinions, and indoctrinate them into Christian surface opinions, they will suddenly be Christians.

When I was much younger, I had an image of Christian evangelism that could most easily be likened to the Church as a fortified camp which, from time to time, sent out raiding parties into the world to bring people into the camp to become Christians like us. Of course, this is a fairly pejorative image, and coming from how I understand the Christian walk now, it’s flatly unhelpful. It comes from the idea that the difference between Christians and the non-Christian is merely a surface set of opinions, and if we take them from the world made up of worldly surface opinions, and indoctrinate them into Christian surface opinions, they will become Christians.

Yet, if the change that comes from conversion is what I think it is, a fundamental alteration of a person’s central heart-paradigm, this method of evangelism is not only unhelpful, it may actually be damaging. It would be convincing people that they are saved from sin when all they have been saved from is a set of incorrect opinions. Indeed, it can even result in entire churches for whom their central object of worship is their own doctrinal correctness instead of the Glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ. We can end up defining “Christian” as “person who agrees with Christian opinions” instead of “person who desires to be like Christ”. The former can be created through indoctrination, the latter requires an act of God to change the heart.

But if this is true, there is a very sobering conclusion to be drawn. I can affirm every point of the creeds and catechisms of the Church, and even memorize large chunks of scripture, but be as utterly lost as the most egregious sinner I can imagine. The question of whether one is a Christian is not whether we agree with a creed (though as I will talk about later, creeds are great diagnostic tools), but whether we have had the kind of change in ultimate goals. Are we desiring to be transformed into the very image of Christ?

So what does this mean for evangelism? It changes our goal. This can be encouraging for some, and discouraging for others since the goal is not to convince people that they should make a profession, read their Bible, or start coming to Church (though those things will all be effects of real evangelism). No, the goal is to glorify Jesus Christ as beautiful, and then live in close community with those who see His beauty.

To change my opening image then, we are not called to make raiding parties into the world, but instead, show the all-surpassing value of Christ.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:1–2. ESV

The screencap of me working on this. Pretty meta, huh?

Being a bit of a tech geek (amateur) means that I find different things interesting and exciting. As I now await with baited breath the coming of yet another permutation of MacOS, I was struck by how this provides some good insight into Romans 12.

When Paul says that we need to not be conformed to this world, it finishes the statement that we need to instead be transformed by the renewal of our minds, that by testing we may discern the will of God, what is good, acceptable and perfect. I’ve often only thought of this as a simple call to allow for Christian ideas to be the basis of my understanding, and not ideas that the world has. I was thinking that a Christian should simply have a list of beliefs about what is true, and then understand the world from that perspective.

In light of the above application, it seems that Paul is getting at something far more fundamental. The renewal of a mind isn’t just replacing one set of ideas for another, but is rather an alteration of the basic understanding of things around us. To use the computer analogy, it isn’t like changing programs on a computer, it’s like changing an operating system. It doesn’t necessarily change the things we think about, but it does change the way we think about the things we think about. In a good OS update, it can cause things to run more quickly and efficiently, and cause damaging programs to no longer do their damage. Some things cease to run, but many other things run and run better, and some new tasks even become possible.

Similarly, the Christian change Paul is talking about isn’t having the right opinions on specific moral and social issues, but instead working through all facets of our lives in a different way. The change is a fundamental one. Where we were once based on a worldly understanding which was fundamentally at odds with God’s truth, we begin to think from a different perspective, even when we are thinking things that kinda look like worldly ideas. Of course, this will mean that opinions that are sinful will work less and less readily on our new operating system, and new ideas, Godly ideas that we find in God’s Word, will begin to make more and more sense.

One would think that these verses, coming as they do right after Paul tells us to give our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, that we’d understand that the change in view here is a very profound one, not merely a change in surface opinions.
This also isn’t to say that the result is a mind that invariably comes to “Christian” opinions from the outset. If that were the case, Paul wouldn’t have to tell us that “by testing” we would be able to “discern” the will of God. The Christian mind doesn’t magically know what would be Godly, but instead works through the implications of an idea, an action, or a decision from a fundamentally altered mind.

There are important implications for this on a range of issues, from apologetics, to cultural contextualization, living your faith and evangelism. God willing, I’ll try to reflect on these over the next couple of days.