My son and his friends have recently been talking about the question of how “serious” one ought to be about Christianity. I think this is at least partly because the American public school system has become openly hostile to Christianity (though not so much to other religions such as Islam), and talking openly about one’s Christian faith produces much more open conflict than it did when I was a child. At any rate, Helen has asked me for my thoughts on the subject, and such as they are, here you go.
For me, there are four passages that come to mind.
“If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” – Paul, in Romans 12:18
“So they [the local political/religious leaders] called them [Peter and John] and ordered them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered them, ‘Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.’…[later, while praying] ‘And now, Lord, look at their threats, and enable your servants to speak your word with boldness.” – Peter and John, in Acts 3
“Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.” – Jesus, in Matthew 10:32-33.
“And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth, and that they may escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will.” – Paul again, this time in 2 Timothy 2:24-26.
I take all of these passages together to mean that we are to be bold, but also gentle and tactful. We should never mute the message of Christ through fear – “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7) – but there will, I think, certainly be times when we refrain from confronting people with the Word of God simply because, in the mental place at which the other person is at that time, they would be repelled rather than attracted. You do not give a baby liver and onions; you do not give a person who has been starved to near death solid or rich food; and you do not needlessly alienate those whom Christ wishes you to win. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven,” including “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8).
There are, I think, two opposite temptations when we find ourselves among those hostile to our faith, especially when our enemies have the power to cause us earthly harm, ranging from ridicule and social ostracization (about the worst that is faced by an American high school student), to loss of livelihood (which many a self-righteous “Social Justice Warrior” will be eager to inflict upon any Christian who dares to utter “hate speech” in an American or European workplace, “hate speech” being in practice defined as “when someone whom the political Left hates, dares to speak”), to death (in Saudi Arabia). The first of these temptations is to self-protective cowardice. Its opposite is the temptation to self-glorifying martyrdom.
I think cowardice requires little explanation; we all understand what it is. Certainly the Bible requires us to be brave; certainly we are not to deny Christ; certainly everyone who wants to be a disciple must take seriously the command to “take up his cross” and the warning that a world that hated the Master must be expected to be unkind to his disciples. Not all of us are required to walk the path of martyrdom, whether of literal physical death or even of metaphorical professional or social death; but to become a Christian without being prepared in advance to pay the price if called upon, is to be a fool. So let there be no doubt that to be a Christian anything but “seriously” is not to be in reality a Christian at all.
But of course, even though we understand what it means to be a coward, and even though none of us want to think ourselves as a coward, and even though we know we must be brave if God calls us into persecution for His sake, still it is very hard to be brave. And Jesus understands that, and He is actually easier on us than you might think. For centuries very many cultures, including very many that are not at all Christian, have urged their young men to be brave even without any apparent reward other than social conformity – “glory” (meaning posthumous reputation) being the only reward for those who die bravely, and shame the penalty for those who turn coward. Spartan mothers, for example, told their sons who were going off to war to return either “with their shields or on them,” making sure that their sons understood that Sparta would see to it that living in Sparta as someone known to have saved his own life by cowardice, would turn out to be a fate literally worse than death. The supreme example of this cultural tendency is surely the Norse warrior ethic, in which every warrior who dies a glorious death gets the privilege of going to Valhalla…where he will get to be part of the army that fights again in Ragnarök and which he already knows is fated to lose, so that he will just die hopelessly all over again, this time eternally.
Jesus, however, does not ask us to be hopelessly brave. Instead He invites us to be full-of-hope brave, to be brave with the courage that knows that “our present sufferings are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). “Fear not those who kill the body,” says Jesus, and Paul tells us why. Not that Jesus doesn’t tell us why himself: “Blessed are you, when people revile you and persecute you and say all manner of things falsely about you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven” (Matthew 5:11-12). And the disciples were so convinced of this, that when persecuted they literally “rejoiced that they were considered worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name” (Acts 5:41).
And this brings us to the opposite side of the coin. Because the Bible is so clear that God will reward those who, in serving him, find themselves to be persecuted and yet “endure to the end,” it is fatally easy to misunderstand by just that little bit that can ruin everything. It is just so easy to believe that we are rewarded for suffering, when in fact we are rewarded for faithfulness. John Milton had to learn a lesson along those lines, so powerfully expressed in his sonnet “On His Blindness,” which ends:
…God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.
It is true that God will richly reward those who suffer for Him. But God will also, I think, equally reward those who He knows would have suffered for Him had He asked them to, even though in the event His plans happened not to require them to suffer. This is not always understood by all Christians, sadly, and thus it happens, in every age and place where there are powerful people who hate the name of Jesus, that Christians can be found who at least appear to go out of their way deliberately to bring down persecution upon themselves.
Partly this is, I suppose, out of a misguided desire to suffer for Christ for the sake of heavenly reward. But we should also remember that for many of us – I am not one of them, but I know that many people in the world are very different myself in temperament – there is a certain pleasure in conflict, a pleasure that comes from being in a fight, especially if one can tell oneself that one is a Good Guy in the fight against Bad Guys. There is a pleasure in hurling condemnation at those whom we dislike or at whom we are angry; any of us who have a bad temper (and this time I am most certainly such a person) know that temptation. But even if we do not struggle with that temptation, there can be a temptation to desire the pleasure of feeling oneself to be a Hero.
This, we must recognize, is absolutely a temptation to sin. I know people who have been deeply hurt by people who were eager to denounce them intemperately, and whose bitter past experiences with “evangelists” represent the single biggest barrier between themselves and Christ. I know – anybody who grew up in the American Bible Belt knows – that there are people who go through life behaving with astonishing rudeness and grotesque insensitivity, but who respond to any attempt at correction by insisting that “the truth hurts,” and who think that the fact that their lives are littered with people who despise them for their rudeness and self-righteousness, is reason to preen themselves on the greatness of their presumed reward in heaven. It is true, no doubt, that the message of the Cross is intrinsically offensive to many people – but that is all the more reason for the messenger to present the message without inflicting any unnecessary additional offense. If we have shared the message with all gentleness and love, and still it causes offense, then we may hope that we are blessed; but if we have shared the message in harshness and vainglory and have driven lost lambs farther from the fold, then may God have mercy on us.
I think of Dr. MacBride in Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian:
Thus to kill what chance he had for being of use seemed to me more deplorable than it did evidently to them [the unsaved cowboys to whom he was preaching]… Yet I knew he was a good man; and I also knew that if a missionary is to be tactless, he might almost as well be bad.
There is, it seems to me, a simple rule of thumb: you should assume that Satan will use persecution, or at least the possibility of persecution, to tempt you. For most of us, probably, the temptation is the temptation to cowardice, and so most of us need to be called to boldness and courage. But if you are not being tempted to cowardice, then you should assume that you are being tempted to…whatever one calls the sort of self-congratulatory, needlessly provocative and confrontational belligerence I have been attempting to describe. (Part of the problem is precisely the fact that we have a very good word, “cowardice,” for the one temptation, but no good word, in English at any rate, for its opposite.) Are you picking a fight that you do not need to pick? Do you like the feeling of being a martyr? Are you – this is where the rubber meets the road – are you truly motivated by love for those whom you are confronting? In answering the last question, you may find the following diagnostic question useful: have you reached the conclusion, through prayer and careful thought, that the path of confrontation is the path most likely to reach the hearts of those whom you are provoking?
On the other hand, I want to make something clear: we are no more called to pass judgment on whether another person is surrendering to this temptation, than we are called to surrender to temptation ourselves. If another person is behaving more confrontationally than we imagine we would in his place, it could be that he is being needlessly belligerent. It could also be that we are too cowardly. But there is a third possibility, and that is that God has called him onto a different path than the path onto which we ourselves are called. The Bible tells us that we should be bold, and also that we should be gentle; it tells us that we should obey God rather than men, but that we also should obey those in human authority over us so far as we can do so in good conscience; it tells us not to fear men, but also to live in peace with them so far as we can do so in good conscience; it tells us not to place our father and mother higher in our loyalty than we place Christ, but also to honor our father and mother so far as we can do so in good conscience. It does not draw helpfully clear lines about exactly what “so far as we can do so in good conscience” means for each person in every circumstance. So not only can honest Christians hold different opinions about where the line is crossed – the line can actually be in different places for different Christians, because God deals with us as individuals who have different callings and who at various times are at different places in their lifelong walk with Him.
Let me take a simple example of a “hard case.” Let us imagine that you have a young person whose parents live in a country whose social and political elites are hostile to orthodox Christianity, such as practically any country in modern Western Europe. This young person’s parents are not Christians themselves, and they have made great personal sacrifices over the course of literally decades to make possible the finest education for their son – who at some point along the way, rather to their dismay, has come to know Christ. And they do not want him to go around making a big public spectacle of his faith, because this will represent a professional death sentence in his profession (there are many such professions, these days), and will destroy everything represented by all their years of sacrifice.
Now, what should this young person do?
I think this is very much more difficult than one might think. It is easy to say, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26), but (a) Jesus loved to make use of the rhetorical technique of hyperbole (I doubt many who would quote that particular scripture have actually cut off their own hands or gouged out their own eyes), and (b) of all the people-directed commandments, the one Jesus seemed to hold in first place was, “Honor your father and your mother.” I think that clearly, if the young man were called into court and asked point-blank, “Are you a Christian?” he would have no choice but to say, “Yes, I am.” Wherever one draws the line for “denying Christ,” that would certainly be on the wrong side of the line. But I think also that the sacrifice made by the young man’s parents is undeniably a very real sacrifice and one that deserves – indeed, demands – honor. So to go marching into the biggest professional convention the young man could find and to interrupt the proceedings by proclaiming through a bullhorn, “I am a Christian, and any of you who are not Christians are going to be damned to hell, and now blackball me if you dare!” would seem to me clearly to cross a line in the other direction. But if you ask me where the point of balance is reached…well, I will tell you quite frankly that I do not know exactly where that line would be for our young Christian, and I would not presume to pass judgment on his choices, so long as he prayerfully and lovingly tried to find the place where God had drawn the line in his own personal case.
In short, we should take our Christianity more seriously than we take anything else in life…but while “taking Christianity seriously” certainly precludes cowardice, it also precludes needless, and hence unloving and ungentle, provocation – and also the needless passing of judgment on the consciences of other Christians. The problem, of course, is that troublesomely ill-defined word “needless.” I can tell you that there is such a thing as needless provocation. But where “needless” falls in your own situation…well, for that you need wiser guides than I.
Redneck Peril 