J.S. Park

Guest Q&A: Losing Faith In Guilt, Part 2

This is a follow-up to an email conversation I had with our awesome Unka Glen. It will make a bit more sense after the previous email. It’s about the religious guilt tactics used in preaching, why they work for altar calls, and why they don’t work in real life.

My reply:

Thanks for the awesome response. Though I may not say it out loud, I do often treat the Christian life as “this one shot or fail.”

I do feel though that it’s perhaps disingenuous to oppose two sides: I still think there is some merit in what the religious people say, even if they’re skipping a lot of stuff to get there. And I’m not sure they’re even consciously aware of pushing guilt/fear/shame buttons. Maybe they saw it worked once, so like a lab rat they kept pushing the trigger.

I’m also interested in the “tools of change.” I know it’s more than rules and brute force and self-maintenance, but I also get foggy when I think “love and grace call me to this.” Sorry if that’s ignorant but I’m not always sure how that works. I’ve been used to white-knuckling it and somehow thinking that was the Spirit.

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Glen’s reply:

You’re totally right, I think the fear, shame, and guilt thing can be a reflex (it may even be the way they were taught as well), and certainly they’re doing it with good intentions. And I agree, it’s less of a two-sided thing as it is (in my mind anyway) an immature versus mature understanding of the discipleship process.

All that doesn’t change that fact that an incomplete, immature, reflexive, and non-grace oriented preaching does real and lasting damage, and that someone somewhere will have to undo this wrong thinking in order to get these people into a healthy relationship with God. But I think you’re right to avoid the process of thinking of all this as a style or a school of thought or a paradigm. At some point all that academic thinking needs to be set aside and it just boils down to the example that Jesus set before us.

Here is a woman caught in the act of adultery, you’re preaching all this grace Jesus, but here is a sin that MUST be condemned. You CAN’T ignore the weight of this wrongness. This moment is about sin and how it must be treated, and nothing else. But Jesus wasn’t backed into that corner. He made that moment about grace. Here is a sinner, caught sinning, and here is Jesus saying “I don’t condemn you, I exhort you to just please stop this way of life that has brought you to this painful end.”

Here is a woman caught in the act of adultery, you’re preaching all this grace Jesus, but here is a sin that MUST be condemned. You CAN’T ignore the weight of this wrongness. This moment is about sin and how it must be treated, and nothing else. But Jesus wasn’t backed into that corner. He made that moment about grace. Here is a sinner, caught sinning, and here is Jesus saying “I don’t condemn you, I exhort you to just please stop this way of life that has brought you to this painful end.”

Fear of condemnation seems to be a powerful thing, what with it’s emotional gravity and all, the way those emotions literally change us physiologically (heart beats faster, gut clenches, break out in a cold sweat), but is it powerful? How long can you be afraid before you just start to overload and go nuts? And what do you turn to then? Well you can’t go to an angry condemning God, that’s for sure. I know, I can turn to sex, or drugs, or alcohol for a release!

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