Guilt-felt and the gospel

Steve Hollinghurst is right. Well, I have to say that of this post of his; it's pretty much what I wrote in 1986 as part of a college study on how people came to Christian faith. My suspicion was that, although we preached forgiveness of sins and freedom from guilt, what people actually responded to was not that. In the course of my investigations I came to the conclusion that most people in the west were not coming to faith out of a conviction of sinfulness and so with a real sense of wanting forgiveness. But the problem is that our Evangelical gospel is focused on this idea and so the instinct has been to begin to preach guilt arousal, to create a need for forgiveness which our formula can then be applied to. Rather than actually find out how the gospel might address contemporary concerns, we have opted instead for the advertisers' way of stimulating 'need' for our product. Of course, given what that is, we come over therefore as pretty negative and moralistic in a bad sort of way.

Steve puts it into cultural analytic mode as he writes,

the idea of conversion as an individual decision based on a personal guilty conscience as a true guide is deeply dependent on a modernist view of humanity. this view both views me as an individual and secondly as a positive individual who is, if I can truly connect with myself , an individual whose reason and reaction will indeed be true. What if actually my conscience is false? What if I feel no guilt for that which God might condemn me, or feel guilt for that of which I should feel none? what if taking that into account, and in today's world both those seem to be true, my guilt was not a product of a divinely guided conscience but a product of a lapsed Christendom in which me guilt was induced by past church experience and thus able to be revived by contemporary church preaching? ... OK most people do suffer feelings of guilt, but they are both often different from what Christianity suggests we ought to feel guilty about, and increasingly assuaged by the sentiment 'well I’m only human' which in modernity and especially post modernity is a perfectly good justification (I don't think it is as a Christian by the way). further to this, as the power of Christendom guilt wears off, the preaching of a gospel geared to it leads to a rejection of the gospel, either as a crutch for the weak and guilty, that is people worse than me, or as something that is moralizing and guilt inducing when no guilt is due. The gospel becomes either at best good news for the truly bad (i.e. only a few) or bad news full stop.

Steve's tentative suggestion is

Might the gospel that frees us from sin and death be the gospel that says, actually you can be like Jesus? Might preaching what we could become, rather than seeking to make us feel guilty for what we are, be not only 'good news' for today?

I think he's onto something in the sense that much searching today is about how to become more than we sense or fear ourselves to be. There's an amazing amount of stuff going on in our culture that is about aspiring to be more, to unlock our potential, to develop the godlike within us. Perhaps we should be less frightened of this and look more fully at the idea of divinisation not as a prequel to a deficit view of humanity so much as to inviting us to partner with God in the big-picture and find our place in a potential that is not bought at the expense of others but for the welfare of all ...

A couple of us at our church have recently begun to wonder what outreach would look like if we based it on the idea that a foretaste of heaven would be to help people to explore and discover things about themselves, positively, that liberate their creativity and expand their /our range of abilities. We like the idea of basing a Christian 'message' on human potential not being left solely to heaven to develop but to begin the project in the here-and-now. This came out of a feeling that heaven might be a place where the many possibilities we each have could be explored because there is clearly more to each of us than the opportunities of this life can allow; surely heaven must be a place where such exploration could go on, and on ...

On Earth as in Heaven: a guilty conscience?