Guilt's Enduring Grip...

The following is an excerpt from RR Reno's section called The Public Square in the recent copy of First Things magazine - the June/ July 2017 issue. The section within the article entitled Guilt's Enduring Grip caught my attention.

You can read the piece in its entirety here.



Guilt’s Enduring Grip by RR Reno


Successful and well-trained college students, often children of prosperous parents, end up denouncing as racist, patriarchal, homophobic, and imperialist the very society that brought them to such happy circumstances. Middle-aged professionals insist that we’re ruining the planet. Global warming is sure to bring our civilization to an end, if not our species. The more advanced wring their hands and regret that Christopher Columbus ever sailed the shining sea. We’ve destroyed the indigenous people—genocide. As Wilfred McClay observes in “The Strange Persistence of Guilt” (Hedgehog Review, Spring 2017), our society risks being overwhelmed by guilt.

A sense of civilizational exhaustion is abroad in the West, and pervasive guilt is an important cause. We fear that the West doesn’t deserve to survive. It’s an attitude I sometimes sense in those who adopt the most drastic predictions of ecological catastrophe and pronounce them with a grim gleefulness. It’s as if they’re grateful that our hubris, negligence, indifference, and wanton waste will finally be punished.

McClay notes the irony of this burden of guilt. Isn’t the divine taskmaster guilt’s source? And once the secular West gets rid of God, won’t guilt melt away, allowing what Nietzsche called “a second innocence”? It hasn’t worked out that way.

Guilt persists, McClay argues, in part because of our “ceaselessly expanding capacity to comprehend and control the physical world.” This implicates us in evil. Just as my child’s well-being now depends on the human ingenuity of medical science, so does that of all children. If a child anywhere in the world starves or dies of a curable disease, humanity is at fault, and that means me. Secularism takes things out of God’s hands—and puts them in ours. What seems like freedom turns into universal responsibility. Instead of indicting God for the world’s evil, we must blame ourselves. Theodicy has given way to anthropodicy.

We have an innate desire for purity. There is a “powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified, to feel themselves to be ‘right with the world.’” In a world without religious means for atonement, ersatz methods emerge. McClay points to the “extraordinary prestige of victims.” They’ve become valuable cultural assets, so much so that many morally sensitive people work very hard to ally themselves with victims. Sometimes this is a cynical way to manipulate political correctness, but more often than not, it’s a sincere effort to shed the burden of guilt.

In Christianity and Judaism (and other religions), people can atone for transgressions that give rise to guilt. In a world without God, the sources of guilt cannot be addressed. Our only option is to offload as much as possible onto others. Thus one’s status as a victim becomes precious, for a victim “can project onto another person, the victimizer or oppressor, any feelings of guilt he might harbor, and in projecting that guilt lift it from his own shoulders.” Without a workable religious mechanism for dealing with guilt, the victim cherishes his victimhood. This explains why so many embrace their identities as victims. It seems wrongheaded to many of us. Ongoing identification as a victim produces a harmful self-image that tends to reinforce one’s sense of powerlessness. But McClay shows that for those under the burden of guilt, victimhood may seem a small price to pay for a clean conscience.

Our public life is increasingly organized around grievances, assignments of collective responsibility, reparation, apology, and other ways to manage guilt. McClay points to Angela Merkel’s extraordinary decision to admit nearly one million migrants in 2015. It only made sense against the background of German guilt over the Holocaust, which continues to shape politics in that country. The same could be said about American guilt over slavery. Again, the paradox: Secularism has intensified the problem of guilt rather than diminishing it.

“The rituals of scapegoating, of public humiliation and shaming, of multiplying morally impermissible utterances and sentiments and punishing them with disproportionate severity, are visibly on the increase in our public life. They are not merely signs of intolerance or incivility, but of a deeper moral disorder,” McClay writes. Our moral economy is broken because we live “in an incoherent post-Christian moral economy that has not entirely abandoned the concept of sin but lacks the transactional power of absolution or expiation without which no moral system can be bearable.”

Too often, we think our secular culture doomed because it has become too permissive. It has been degraded by moral deregulation, and those who suffer most are the weak and vulnerable. But as McClay observes, strong strains of moral condemnation remain, much of it refracted through political categories, and a great deal of it self-imposed. Thus, the crisis may be that secular culture lacks what ­Philip Rieff called (following Nietzsche) the “tender yesses” of remission. We cannot make atonement and find forgiveness without putting sin before someone greater than ourselves.

Absolution - So How Long Does Forgiveness Last?

The following is an item written by my pastor, Pr. Kevin Martin, for a recent monthly newsletter. I thought it was a really good response to the question many have when it comes to Holy Absolution.
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A church member asked me recently: “Pastor, after you pronounce absolution in the divine service, uhm… how long does… the ah, forgiveness last?” I thought that was a great question and I also thought there might be others who’ve wondered the same thing but were afraid to ask. It lasts forever! That’s the short answer. But the (only slightly) longer answer is even stranger and better…

All our sins were forgiven, all people’s everywhere for all time when Jesus died on a cross outside Jerusalem, April 6, 30 AD, 3 pm. Whether they know it or not. Whether they want to be forgiven or not. We all are and were forgiven completely on Good Friday (which we recently celebrated). Easter Sunday (while it is the larger day, festival-wise) is actually the icing on the cake, the results of what Jesus won in the darkness of that terrible Friday afternoon. But that’s what (Who!) did it: Jesus forgave the world’s sin by dying in our place that Great Friday. And the great thing about that death of His that day is that it didn’t just forgive sins people were committing then. His death reached back, the previous week, previous month, previous year, previous century, previous millennia, reached back all the way into the distant past, all the way to another garden, where Adam and Eve had just eaten an apple and had lost a great deal. That original sin was forgiven that Friday afternoon by Jesus too. And His forgiveness reached for-ward, centuries ahead, to cover over your sins and mine. It reaches forward to cover everyone’s sins who will ever live until that day when He returns in glory and there is no need for anymore forgiveness. Jesus’ death covers and forgives all sins, of all people of all times and places. Always.

So what happens at the beginning of the communion service when the pastor stands up, (after we confess that we are poor, miserable sinners) and says “As a called and ordained servant of Christ and by His authority, I forgive you all your sins.”? If Jesus won forgiveness for all of us for all time, what’s up with that? Well, it’s the Department of Redundancy Department (sort of). Jesus, through His servants, is doing the forgiving thing all over again, or more exactly applying the effects of that forgiveness like a fresh coat of paint on a peeling and cracked wall.

Why? Because we are people of little faith. Because our sins keep coming back to haunt us like Scrooge’s ghosts (only not so kind-hearted!). We keep seeing the stain re-appearing on that wall we thought we’d painted and made sparkling white. Here’s where it gets a little weird (a little sci-fi): the wall (us!) really is sparkling white. There are no cracks, no peeling paint. Jesus’ death has made us just like Him, pure and holy. But instead of just telling us we are fine, pure and clean, and demand we believe it better, because we really do see and feel the stains, the damage, and so do our neighbors, Jesus repairs the damage we perceive all over again just as He did that Friday afternoon in the 1st century in Jerusalem. Another coat of paint on the wall, another wrapping in the robes of His righteousness. The death of Christ really was the end of the world and the beginning of a new age, a new time. But faith is required to live in that new world, that new time, and when faith falters, even a little bit, so do the good effects of Jesus’ death—from our perspective at least.

So Jesus keeps fixing the unbroken wheel—the wheel of our bodies and souls, because to us it is bent and out of round, really broken, even though it was repaired perfectly even before we were born or even did the damage. We simply have trouble living into the life Christ gives, living as we truly are in Him. This is the mission of Christ He carries out through His holy, catholic, orthodox, and apostolic church: He continually continues, by the forgiveness of sin, to make us over in His image; He makes us grow up into His image, to become true human beings at Last.

Our lack of faith keeps us from seeing this, experiencing this, living this. So the forgiveness of sins in Holy Baptism, Holy Preaching, Holy Absolution, Holy Communion continually makes right all that we get wrong, really, truly, physically, eternally, spiritually, ontologically, and metaphysically. Because we need it. Because we live in a fog of unbelief that clouds everything. At His Return in Glory, we will see Him as He is and so be like Him and will never have need of any more “touch-ups”. Till then, Jesus doesn’t mind forgiving what He’s already redeemed, over and over 70 times 7, times 7 times 7 times… well, you get the picture.

So when I tell you this Sunday: “As a called and ordained servant of Christ and by His authority, I forgive you all your sins” that will last forever. Even when you walk out of church and bark at your wife, it’s already been “pre-forgiven” if you will. You’re good (and so is she, though if you tell her and show her how good and lovely she really is, life will be better for both of you, I would judge). But because you will have trouble believing that, because other sins will mount up, we’ll see each other again next week and go over it all again, until one Day, the Last and Great Day, Jesus will show up and real Life will begin in earnest…

                                        - Pr. Kevin Martin
                                          Our Savior Lutheran Church (Raleigh, NC)

Impostors and Ragamuffins (or Simul Iustus et Peccator)

First, a selection of quotes from Brennan Manning from his chapter - Paste Jewelry and Sawdust Hotdogs - in his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel.

Impostors in the Spirit always prefer appearances to reality. Rationalization begins with a look in the mirror. We don't like the sight of ourselves as we really are, so we try cosmetics, makeup, the right light, and the proper accessories to develop an acceptable image of ourselves. We rely on the stylish disguise that has made us look good or at least look away from our true self. Self-deception mortgages our sinfulness and prevents us from seeing ourselves as we really are - ragamuffins.

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my résumé. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds. I drop hints about the absolute priority of meditation and contemplation to create the impression that I am a man of prayer. At some unremembered moment I have lost the connection between internal purity of heart and external works of piety. In the most humiliating sense of the word, I have become a legalist. I have fallen victim to what TS Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

At Sunday worship, as in every dimension of our existence, many of us pretend to believe we are sinners. Consequently, all we can do is pretend to believe we have been forgiven. As a result, our whole spiritual life is pseudo-repentance and pseudo-bliss.

The appeal of paste jewelry and sawdust hot dogs is powerful....[t]o the extent that I reject my ragamuffin identity, I turn away from God, the community, and myself. I become a man obsessed with illusion, a man of false power and fearful weakness, unable to think, act, or love.

I have a confession. My impetus for reading this chapter was to help me ponder why certain things other people do bother and disturb me.  Things such as posting photos on social media about how wonderful they are, and all their self-congratulating.

Then honesty and truth show themselves to me.  I ultimately realize this post may be more about me and my pretensions.  I like what I have heard Brennan Manning say in interviews and various lectures he gave - how he's broken every one of the 10 Commandments... 6 times on Tuesday.  I, too, am guilty in like manner.  And I'm positive that's not hyperbole.

Even after I came to this realization, my prayer was "Christ, have mercy." But even then I realized I was praying with a bit of self-righteousness.  Still angered by others, and just wishing some of those that share their public self-congratulations could get a hint of my apparent humbleness and piety.

And it's not just this time, but so many other times when I pray something as similar as "Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner." I ask myself, "Am I really asking for mercy and forgiveness, or am I really doing my own version of the humble brag?"

It's at these times I realize the truth of what Manning wrote earlier in The Ragamuffin Gospel:  "At the cross, Jesus unmasked the sinner not only as a beggar, but as a criminal before God."

There's no escaping this guilt as we are all not merely beggars, but absolutely guilty of our crimes.  Yet there is true redemption by the love and mercy of God.  We are truly forgiven. In Christ Jesus.

Lord Jesus, we are silly sheep who have dared to stand before You and try to bribe You with our preposterous portfolios. Suddenly we have come to our senses. We are sorry and ask You to forgive us. Give us the grace to admit we are ragamuffins, to embrace our brokenness, to celebrate Your mercy when we are at our weakest, to rely on Your mercy no matter what we may do. Dear Jesus, gift us to stop grandstanding and trying to get attention, to do the truth quietly without display, to let the dishonesties in our lives fade away, to accept our limitations, to cling to the gospel of grace, and to delight in Your love. Amen.

In the Name + of Jesus. Amen.

We Are All Beggars In The Holy Supper

The apostle [Paul] wishes to say: Consider, beloved Christians, that when you receive the blessed cup and the blessed bread, each one partakes of the body and blood of Christ; they are both common to all of you. You come into body-and-blood fellowship with one another. For just as many grains become one bread, so in the Holy Supper, you, though you are many, become one Body, one mass, because you are partakers of the one bread and with it one and the same body and blood of Christ.

Because of the presence and participation of the body of Christ, the Holy Supper is a meal of the most intimate fellowship and, therefore, at the same time, the highest love-meal. Just as fervent love is demanded, so fervent love is delivered. We all come together, as children of the same family, to the table of our common, heavenly Father. As great as the distinction between communicants in civic life may be, in the Holy Supper all distinctions evaporate. We are all the same, in that we each eat the same earthly and heavenly bread and drink the same earthly and heavenly drink. In this Meal, the subject and his king, the slave and his master, the beggar and the rich, the child and the old man, the wife and the husband, the simple and the learned, truly all communicants stand as the same poor sinners and beggars, hungry and thirsty for grace. Although one may appear in a rough apron while another in velvet and satin, adorned with gold and pearls, when they depart, all take with them that for which they hunger and thirst: Christ's blood and righteousness as their beauty and glorious dress. No one receives a better food and better drink than the other. All receive the same Jesus, and with Him, the same righteousness.

—C. F. W. Walther


(taken from PrayNow app via Concordia Publishing House)
(italics mine)

Former Adventures In The Evangelical Wilderness

I can certainly identify with the following sentiments someone made on a recent Facebook thread. I do not miss my days in the so-called evangelical wilderness.

“For those of us who come from the make-it-up-as-you-go land of Evangelicalism, Missionalism, Seeker-Drivenism, we lived the innovative phrases of "loving on people", "prayer warriors,” "listening to God with intentionality", "stepping out in faith", "obeying God in the last thing He gave you to do, so he'll count you worthy to give you your next assignment." We fled that land for one built on the solid, unshifting rock of Christ; and Him crucified for the ungodly.  We fled that land for unchanging and definable language expressed in the confessions, historic liturgy, and Word and Sacrament.”

Letetia Marie - as quoted from FB (slightly modified)

Doctrine and Practice

Quote of the Day

"Doctrine and practice, especially liturgical practice, while distinct, cannot really be divided. Doctrine is largely hidden, like the studs that form the walls of your house. But how those walls are finished has as much to do with the structure of that house as those hidden two by fours."

Pr. William Cwirla

Billboard Theology...

"Live for me. I died for you."

Wretched. Vile. Wrong.

This kind of guilt-trip Christianity is poisonous. It's poisonous because it teaches that God gave you Christ not out of His own Fatherly love, but because He just wanted your obedience. And it's poisonous because it teaches that what Jesus won on the cross was not your full salvation, but merely the opportunity to win salvation for yourself through your own works.

Leave it to the Evangelicals to combine the worst of Geneva and Rome in six words and to think that they're somehow doing the Lord's work in the process.

Thank God for Lutheranism. Thank God for faithful preaching and faithful preachers. Thank God for His Gospel. And thank God this billboard ain't it!

-Pr. Hans Fiene from a Facebook posting

How Lutheranism Saved Me from American Evangelicalism...

I just finished reading a blog post from Chaplain Mike on The Internet Monk website.

He wrote a wonderful piece about what Lutheranism has meant to him.  His points regarding Word and Sacrament, the pastor not being a CEO, but a pastor, and the doctrine of vocation were some of the things that brought me such great relief and a breath of fresh air upon arrival into Lutheranism.  He didn't mention Law and Gospel specifically, and hope that he does later in this series, but that was for me, The Thing, causing me to make confessional Lutheranism my home. 

I also think Chaplain Mike is right when he points out that American evangelical church has bowed down to pragmatism and relevance, and has cast off biblical fidelity.  This cannot be overstated.

I can completely identify with his leaving American evangelicalism behind.  I wandered about in the 'post-evangelical wilderness' for some time, completely unsure of what to do.   Gratefully, I have found a home in confessional Lutheranism. It steadfastly points to me that Christ has come to serve me, a wretched sinner.  I have nothing to offer but my sin.  My trust has to be completely on what Christ has done for me, not the other way around.

I am eagerly anticipating more of this series regarding Lutheranism from Chaplain Mike.  I would highly recommend checking out this blog post by Chaplain Mike and the upcoming series on Lutheranism.

The Will of God...

The following is a devotional from Higher Things.  A wonderful reminder who actually does the will of God...

August 14, 2011 - Sunday of the Eighth Week after Trinity

Today's Reading: Matthew 7:15-23

Daily Lectionary: 2 Samuel 1:1-27; 1 Corinthians 7:25-40

Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. (Matthew 7:21)

In the Name + of Jesus. Amen. Just because you call Jesus Lord doesn't mean you're in. Whoa! Wait a minute! What does THAT mean? It means simply this: Not everyone who claims to be a Christian really is. So how do you know? How can you be sure? Jesus says that everyone who does the will of His Father will enters the kingdom of heaven.

Okay. Checklist time. Do you love God above all things? Do you love your neighbor as yourself? Don't lie. That's God's will. Have you done it? If not, don't get all and say, “Lord, Lord!” to Jesus.

But Jesus tells us also that God's will is that we believe in the One whom He sent, that is, believe in Jesus. And here we begin to realize that the doing of God's will is not something we'll ever be able to do. It is something that must be done for us, otherwise we're doomed. Or, to put it another way, if you call out “Lord, Lord” because you think you've done God's will, you're in trouble. But if you call out “Lord, Lord,” because only the Lord can save you then you have the promise of a Savior.

First of all, Jesus did the Father's will. All of it. He loved the Father perfectly. He loved others perfectly, even giving His life for ours. He obeyed the Father's will to save sinners. He obeyed and kept every Law and commandment. That is Jesus doing the Father's will. The will of God is that those who don't keep His Law are doomed. So Jesus did that, too, when He suffered for our sins and died for them. Then He rose again, defeating death.

Now He still carries out that will by the Spirit who has brought you to faith in the waters of Holy Baptism and who keeps you saying, “Lord, Lord” the right way by the words of Absolution and the Supper of Jesus' body and blood.

In accomplishing salvation and delivering it to you, Jesus is doing the Father's will. And because you are in Him, you have done the Father's will. And your “Lord, Lord” is the confession of a Savior who won't let you down. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.

Grant to us, Lord, we implore You, the Spirit to think and do always such things as are right, that we, who cannot do anything that is good without You, may be enabled to live according to Your will; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord. Amen. (Collect for Trinity 8)