When writing a book, you often have to cut material. This article is a section that didn’t make it into the final printing of A Sharp Compassion, but I think it still matters. It is taken from the chapter on affirmation and examines how the church has been tempted to avoid what offends.
In 1957, Jack Kerouac offered his answer to a growing American restlessness. He published On the Road. A fast-paced and reckless story of nonstop road trips—pages packed with drugs, sex, jazz, and a new kind of American freedom. It became, for many young men, a manual for finding oneself on the open road.
In one of its most famous passages, the book’s narrator explains,
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
That is the sentiment of our time. Nothing is believed to be more authentic than personal desire. And no one can question what you want.
In 1970, John Updike wrote a very different kind of novel, one he said was a response to the success of On the Road. John Updike’s Rabbit Run depicts a former high school basketball star: broke, frustrated by a loveless marriage, one kid and another on the way, and a dead-end job as a local supermarket salesman. Desperate to relive the glory of his youth, Updike’s protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, abandons his family in the name of self-pursuit and gradually destroys all the things he once loved.
Both novels talk plenty about God. Both raise questions Americans have historically turned to the church to help answer. But Updike alone recognizes the unique temptation the church faces.
In Updike’s novel, Rabbit genuinely believes that abandoning his family is a kind of spiritual pursuit to find himself. He explaines to his pastor, “Well I don’t know all this about theology, but I’ll tell you. I do feel, I guess that somewhere behind all this… there’s something that wants me to find it!” His pastor, Jack Eccles, works tirelessly to reconcile Rabbit with his estranged wife, but Eccles has his own insecurities. He is convinced that his clerical robe and collar rob him of relatability and cost him Rabbit’s genuine respect. He feels he isn’t relevant to Rabbit’s life and interests. His pastoral insecurities lead him to covet Rabbit’s friendship. He imagines that being Rabbit’s friend is an essential prerequisite to leading him back to faith.
Frustrated by his lack of success, Eccles pays a visit to an older minister seeking advice. He explains all the attempts he has made and his psychological theories about Rabbit’s childhood and the lack of love in their marriage, and how both their parents had contributed through their own marital misfortunes, and how he was attempting to rework Rabbit’s conscience but not too prematurely as to risk communicating the impossibility of reconciliation… As Eccles went on, the older minister finally interrupts:
“Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…I’ve listened to your story but I wasn’t listening to what it said about the people, I was listening to what it said about you. What I heard was this: the story of a minster of God selling his message for a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf… you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer… When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot… with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of your belief…. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing.”
As a pastor, I know this temptation. And it’s one every church and believer faces. In the age of the psychological man, we are tempted to rework our message into today’s psychological categories. It’s a temptation to smooth things out. To solve all the problems and to theorize all their sources and solutions. The temptation is to become relevant and to trade the offensive claims of the gospel for self-help advice.
We trade what we have for “a few scraps of gossip and a few games of golf.” “Decency and busyness” is a great way of describing many churches today. But Updike recognized what too often we forget. It isn’t our job to simply counsel and guide people toward happiness and a better version of themselves. The church and Christ do not exist to help us acquire our heart’s desires. The gospel is meant to reshape our desires. The church’s job is to present Christ, to be on fire with Christ. To burn them with the force of our belief. To burn up desire itself if it keeps us from Christ.
Unfortunately, it’s not an easy time to profess such strong convictions. As the people of Isaiah’s day pleaded with him, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophecy illusions.” People are not looking to be burnt by holiness. What we’re looking for is some encouragement, a little blessing, and a quick word of affirmation.
We have made the church and Jesus so relevant it has lost its ability to say anything contradictory to the world. Our lives became indistinguishable from our neighbors, and our words about God and salvation take on the language of daytime talk shows and self-help gurus. Afraid of offending, we drain the gospel of its power to confront. We abandoned the language of repentance and the Jesus that contradicts, and we take up the mantel of therapy. We peddled Christian doctrine as self-help remedies to a better marriage, finances, and workplace purpose. At its worst, we allow the evaluations of an unbelieving culture to become the measuring stick for the church’s truth.
The Temptation of Relevance
The Apostle Peter stood full of the Holy Spirit and told the gathered crowd of worshipers they had killed Jesus. The people felt deeply convicted and answered, “What shall we do?” Today, confronted with such a direct challenge, most people roll their eyes, pick up their phones, change the channel, or unsubscribe. Drop the Apostle Peter on the street today, and if he wants to hold a crowd, he better have some magic trick or dance routine to keep them paying attention. You can’t talk to people like that today, we’d warn him. You can’t risk offending them. Offend them, and they’ll be gone. And they do seem to be disappearing.
The church has long been tempted by that fashionable logic of every age: give the people what they want. The modern Church Growth Movement has made us experts at it, but even the old crowns of ancient power knew the lesson. Give the mob bread and circus, and you can do just about anything else you want. Pleasing the crowd has always seemed sensible. Consider the temptations of Jesus.
While the suggestion to turn stones into bread was surely about his own growling stomach, the suggestion he hurl himself off the peak of the temple and let the angels descend to rescue him was all about putting on a public display of power, precisely what those long-waiting Jews had been looking for. It’s also worth noting that Satan specifically quoted Psalm 91, promising that Jesus would not trip over a stone (skandalon). He offered Jesus a way of avoiding offense. Feed yourself and give the people what they want. Satan suggested this was the only way to make everyone happy. Jesus turned down both.
The Gospel as Hard Truth
In 427 A.D., one of the church’s great leaders, Augustine, described the growing demands of his own day. They pleaded,
“Let those who are over us only prescribe to us what we ought to do, and pray for us that we may do it; but let them not rebuke and censure us if we should not do it.” Augustine answered, “You must be rebuked even for that very reason that you do not wish to be rebuked. For you do not wish that your faults should be pointed out to you; you do not wish that they should be touched, and that such a useful pain should be caused you that you may seek the Physician.”
It’s worth noting that Augustine was addressing those already in the church. If believers are unwilling to hear hard words, what chance do we have of proclaiming them to the broader culture?
In the 1930’s, Bonhoeffer offered a similar warning. The church faces a constant temptation toward what he called cheap grace. Bonhoeffer defined cheap grace as forgiveness without any genuine repentance or intention to change. Bonhoeffer recognized that the German church had offered grace at too low a cost. He explained, “We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving. We poured forth unending streams of grace. But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.”
Bonhoeffer went so far as to suggest that the collapse of the German church, which would eventually make it complicit with Nazi policy, was caused by its softening of the gospel message. The church gave them what they wanted: a cheap salvation that required no self-examination or contrition. The church offered an easy word and never a hard one. It cost the church greatly. As Bonhoeffer concluded, “Cheap grace has turned out to be utterly merciless to our Evangelical Church.” It was merciless because it robbed them of the very thing it had promised: genuine cultural influence.
That is perhaps the greatest loss of all. For what have Christians gained if they are liked but never able to speak the full truth?
Read more in A Sharp Compassion (Order the Book)
