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| Actual Irishmen not pictured |
And so it
begins with a story:
Three Irishmen are sitting in the pub window
seat, watching the front door of the
brothel over the road.
The local Methodist pastor appears, looks up
and down the street, and quickly goes inside.
"Would you look at that!" says the
first Irishman. "Didn't I always say what a bunch of hypocrites they
are?"
No sooner are the words out of his mouth than
a Rabbi appears at the door, looks up and down the street, knocks, and goes
inside.
"Another one trying to fool everyone with
pious preaching and stupid hats!" They continue drinking their beer
roundly condemning the vicar and the rabbi when they see their own Catholic
priest knock on the door.
"Ah, now dat's sad." says the third
Irishman. "One of the girls must have died."
It’s
interesting how we can be so clear about the moral failings of others and yet
be blinded to our own or those in our own society.
As someone
who has been a serious student and teacher of church history for many years,
one of the constant issues I have grappled with is what to make of some of the
decisions, behaviors, and ideas of some of the church’s great luminaries. Here are people of great vision and piety and
theological imagination who at the same time do things that seem radically at
odds with their Christian commitment.
A few well
known examples:
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| Martin Luther in exile |
Martin
Luther had a strong tendency towards anti-Semitism that at times was quite
vicious.
Constantine,
the great Christian emperor, ordered the death of one of his sons and his wife.
John Calvin,
no stranger to persecution by Catholics, was responsible for having a teacher
holding heretical views burned at the stake in downtown Geneva.
Jonathan
Edwards, one of America’s greatest thinkers and theologians, owned at 3 slaves
during his lifetime and even justified his holding of them when confronted by
other church leaders for doing so.
John Wesley
and George Whitefield virtually abandoned their wives to pursue their preaching
careers.
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| Constantine the Christian Emperor |
Of course
there are more, many more, examples if time and space permitted.
So what are
we to make of these things and how should we respond to them towards critics of
the faith or the church? Let me make 3
suggestions:
1. Approach historic figures charitably and not
judgmentally. It is certainly not my
original thought (I think I may have got it from C.S. Lewis or R.C. Sproul) but
we must exercise a Christian charity not just to the living, but especially the
dead for they are unable to defend or explain themselves. Brendan Manning speaks to this quite
eloquently: “None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know we
can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For
this good and valid reason, we're told not to judge. ..Tragedy is that our
attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who
they might become.” With historical figures we often know what they did but are
often left without a shred of evidence about why they did something. Sometimes historical context sheds light,
sometimes the person leaves a memoir explaining (or justifying) themselves, but
many times it is still conjecture. We
can’t walk a mile in their shoes, we don’t understand their particular sin
matrix, we know nothing of the fears and prejudices that fed their
thinking. What we do know for certain is
that Christians are people and people are sinners and sinners need the grace of
God.
2. Recognize
cultural myopia; theirs and your own. Myopia is another word for
near-sightedness where things up close are very clear but anything in the
distance is quite blurred. Every one of
us is shaped by our times and culture and this does in fact color our sense of
ethics and values. Truth be told, it
even shapes the interpretation of scripture.
Mark A. Noll presents a clear example of this in his book The Civil War as Theological Crisis. How could a nation which was at the time
predominantly Christian, Protestant, Bible-reading, and Church-going literally plunge
into the dark hole of fratricide over slavery when slavery is clearly unethical
by the standards of Jesus? Among many
things, Noll points out that habits of Bible reading and interpretation of the
day tended to support slavery because verses were often read in isolation from
one another.
To read a
summary of this book go to: http://soulepigraph.blogspot.com/2010/03/civil-war-as-theological-crisis-by-mark.html
But this
applies to many things besides scriptural interpretation. We live in a time of consumerism, leisure, sex-saturation,
and obsession with choices and independence.
We know these things, but we know them like a goldfish knows it lives it
water. Jonathan Edwards (who lived in
colonial America) owned a slave(s) but so did a lot of other ministers in New
England. Unlike George Washington who
actually set his slaves free upon his death because his conscience was troubled
by his ownership, Edwards did nothing of the sort. We are grieved by the blindness of this great
man of God who had a fierce intellect and was so devoted to preaching and
holiness in his community. But no doubt
Edwards would be grieved to meet our generation with so little concern for
pleasing God and that wastes so much time fiddling with telephone apps and
looking at sex and violence on television.
We think nothing of it!
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| I'm sure Edwards would be amused with phone apps! |
What will
future generations say of us when we are the people in the graveyard? Evil is still evil and Jonathan Edwards (and
all the other examples I mentioned) was definitely blind to that species of
sin, but that does not mean that God couldn’t or didn’t use them for a good
purpose. We are all works in progress
and if anything it reveals the patience and grace of God through all the ages.
3. Learn
from their mistakes without justifying their evil. When we encounter these terrible blemishes on
the records of great men, we need not shrug them off or worse yet adopt their
sinful behavior. We should learn the
moral lesson their lives offer. We
should be humbled by the fact that if great people who serve Christ are capable
of making really bad choices and doing evil things, what of ourselves? None of us is so faithful as to never fail.
For a great practical devotion on how to put this verse into practice go to:
http://www.raystedman.org/daily-devotions/2-corinthians/how-to-examine-yourself
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