Why We Must Speak

So there's two very different offerings on the table at UNC for how to deal with the basic problem of human brokenness, pain, and the resulting guilt and shame.

One offer of salvation comes from this secular, humanistic school of thought (including, alas, the extremely liberal "Christian" church). Their response to the basic problem of human brokenness and pain and guilt and shame is to try to remove as much stigma as possible.

Everything is okay. No decision is a bad decision--except the decision to feel bad about yourself or to judge someone else's decision to be a bad one. You needn't feel guilty about anything because you have nothing to feel guilty about.

The solution proposed here is to try to do away with the standards that might induce guilt or shame, to lower the bar, so to speak, so that everyone can clear it as easily as possible.

But the Christian response is quite different. Freedom from guilt and brokenness does not come by lowering the bar but by actually dealing with the problem. Left to ourselves, we are guilty. We do indeed make bad decisions, catastrophic ones sometimes.

And the solution is not a covering-up. It is a rooting-out. The solution is God who has come himself to deal with and abolish all the brokenness and rebellion and sin that destroys our humanity. And he does so at great cost to himself.

Our problem, it seems, is not that we have taken sin and guilt too seriously but that we have not taken the solution seriously enough.

My hope is that those of us who know what God has done to deal with this problem will be way more bold in offering the hope that is ours. Otherwise, what other option is there but to water it down or drown it in anger or escapism?

We weren't made to bear the guilt and brokenness that is innate to the human condition after the fall. And so we invent ways out--and the inventions of our own making just complicate and exacerbate the problem rather than actually addressing it and curing it.

And so we who are Christ-followers must speak. We must speak boldly, courageously, with integrity and gentleness and humility and conviction. God has dealt with our greatest problems in Christ. This is good news. It must be spoken.