Yesterday's post drew quite a number of responses. One comment celebrated being out of college--to her there were a greater number of opportunities for self-righteousness while in school surrounded by Christians.
I've been thinking on this today and on the one hand, I agree. When you get a community full of eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds together, passion is high. That can often get mis-directed into self-righteousness. And Craig Fowler proposes in his 'stages of faith' that we all have to go through a black-and-white stage as a part of our development spiritually, and that's typically where college students are.
But I would argue that self-righteousness is one-hundred-percent a part of the human condition. No matter how old we are or what life stage we are in, we are always looking for something to be our righteousness apart from Christ.
We're incomplete creatures. In our clearest moments we know this. God offers to complete us in Christ. But we reject that (some of us aggressively and obviously, others of us in more subtle ways) and try to find other things to prop us up, to validate us or to give us a sense of worth.
When that gets externalized in clear and proud ways we call it being 'self-righteous' about something. That takes all sorts of forms, and it's particularly ugly when religion gets involved with it, as Jesus' interactions with the religious leaders shows.
When we had our first child six years ago, one question swirling around us was were we going to "grow our kids God's way" (also a title of a book for those of you who aren't a part of my little slice of the Christian world)?
We looked at it and decided no, we weren't--at least, not all the way. Did that mean we were growing kids Satan's way? To some people, it did. That was the way, the only way, to do it correctly.
But then we started looking into the complete polar-opposite approach to parenting: attachment parenting. It has a more hippie, less religious feel to it...but the people on that end of the spectrum were just as rabid, just as "self-righteous" about it as anyone on the more religious end who were growing kids God's way.
The point is that self-righteousness is always our temptation, at every age and every stage of our lives. In this parenting world, both attachment parenting and 'growing kids God's way' advocates were expressing the exact same distorted self-righteousness, just using different outlets or forms.
All of us are tempted to be 'justified,' propped up, validated by someone or something apart from what God has done for us in Jesus: our money, our friendships, our kids behavior, what we think we know about theology or cars or music or the economy or home repair.
For those of us who claim to follow Jesus, self-righteous arrogance should be the last thing that we express. This whole project is built on the fundamental presupposition that we have no such thing as righteousness that comes from ourselves. This whole thing starts with admitting that we're broken, sinful, needy people. That's where we meet grace. That's what this whole thing is about, start to finish.
And all of our self-righteousness must go if we are ever to become fully human. Not that we don't grow in knowledge or experience or have things to offer one another in terms of correction or information or helps. But we offer that humbly, acknowledging that none of it is the "righteousness" that we were actually made to inhabit. None of it actually ever heals our hearts.
Not even if you're growing kids God's way.
No comments:
Post a Comment