the grime and the glory
If you hang around with Christian parents for long enough, you’ll start to hear the same comment coming up in conversation repeatedly. “Isn’t it amazing how quickly you can see that they’re wee sinners?”
Now, I have no desire to downplay the depths of human sinfulness. I tend to agree with G.K. Chesterton that original sin is the only part of Christian belief that can actually be proved. We don’t even need to open a newspaper to find the evidence, since we don’t need to look any further than our own little bundle of selfish desires and habits.
But there’s something about how quickly and how often this comment is made that makes me a little uneasy.
More accurately, what disturbs me is our failure to say something else first.
The Christian story doesn’t begin with original sin. It begins with something like original goodness and original beauty. It begins with a garden, a good creation, and human beings who have been made in the image of their good creator. This is the breathtaking dignity and glory which the Christian story gives to all human beings. “He made us little less than gods,” the psalmist says.
Of course that original goodness and beauty has been fractured by the fall. But it hasn’t been completely destroyed. It still comes through in whispers and glimpses. The image of God has been smudged, but not erased. We are this strange, paradoxical mixture of dignity and depravity, glory and grime.
There’s something badly wrong if all we can see in our children is the grime – if we fixate on their failures and their sin, while the happy pagans down the road marvel at their child’s capacity for playfulness and unfettered joy, their moments of spontaneous kindness and generosity, the unique personality and gifts and quirks which they bring to the world.
It’s one of the great strengths of the Christian story that it faces with honesty the ugly side of human nature, and refuses to hide it or excuse it or rationalise it away. But when we start there, something gets horribly distorted. A story which is meant to be good news becomes harsh and abusive.
And too often, that’s exactly where we start. It’s where many of our evangelical statements of faith begin. It’s where we often begin with our children, and in relating to people who don’t share our faith. More and more I’m wondering if this is the thing which most often goes rotten at the heart of evangelical Christianity – the failure to recognise this original goodness, the image of God in all people.
There’s a cliche which rightly insists that the good news of redemption only makes sense against the backdrop of the bad news of sin. But we also need to insist that this bad news in turn only makes sense against the backdrop of the good news of our creation in God’s good image. The bad news comes sandwiched between a good beginning and a good end.
The full tragedy of our sin is that we fall short of the high calling we were created for. The tragedy is that we are rarely as good as we are in our best moments, that we don’t live out in reality what we aspire to in our best dreams. We fall short of the glory.
But the glory is what we need to notice first, in each other, and especially in our children. We need to look for the glimpses of goodness, of beauty, of God’s image, which point to what we once were, and what we can be again.
Of all the parents in our street, we should be the ones who are quickest to notice and celebrate these glimpses of glory in our children.
And then we can turn to face the grime, with joy and hope as well as honesty. And the story we tell may actually start to feel like good news to our children, and smell like good news to our neighbours.
Rach says:
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:47 am
I LOVE this post Jaybercrow, maybe because I’ve been thinking some of the same things (in a less articulate manner) recently. I’ve been blessed by acts of kindness from so many people recently, and by seeing how sweet and caring my wee dude can be (when he’s not exhibiting an amazing ability to be deliberately defiant).
QMonkey (honestly) says:
January 22nd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
This is an interesting post to me. I’m currently re-reading “Orthodoxy” and have just finished ‘They F*** you up -- Oliver James”. The GKC quote about sin being the only provable thing about Christianity jumped out of the page at me when I read it less than a week ago (hence it being interesting that you quote it too).
But my take on it was… what the heck?… ok then GK, go on then prove it… but no, he thinks that its so obvious that he can just leave it hanging there… for such a smart man I found this, well very revealing. I appreciate how you’ve expanded on it in your post and warned against not just looking for badness. But I do think there is something abusive to look at your child and think…yep, I can see it, the bible is right… wee Jonny is oozing with sin and dripping with iniquity… his loving creator god won’t want anything to do with him… unless he buys into the whole Jesus narrative and admits that he’s ‘bad’ and there’s nothing he can do about it.
From reading ‘They F*** you up’, the case studies are stunning in their regularity into how a teenager/young adult turns out is so much to do with how they are parented… not genetic… and certainly not because they gots tha devil in em!
(i’ll avoid trying to drag you in to a debate about what, if anything, is good and evil)
I am as always, a humble searcher
kickedbyanelephant says:
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:03 pm
This post also made me think about Oliver James ‘They F*** you up’. As an inexperienced parent it’s frightening to think that every little thing I do with my kids could shape their personality. James presents a very good argument but personally I don’t buy it.
Firstly a lot of the ‘evidence’ in these type of studies is qualitative rather than quantitative. I am sceptical about statements of ‘proof’ from quantitative medical research at the best of times but in my opinion, qualitative research is less ’scientific’ and open to more researcher bias. In other words, often you can pretty much get the result you are looking for. Of course I’m not sure that this is the case in Jame’s book but I’m still sceptical.
Secondly he makes the presumption that the only options for what forms personality & behaviour are genetic, environmental or a mixture of both influences. But I believe there is a third very important factor – our spiritual nature, our soul, the fact that we are created unique in the image of God and How as the Bible tells us He knew us before we were born.
I remember being struck shortly after our first son was born how much of an individual he seemed to be. Right from the start he seemed to have his own personality. I also remember being totally unaware of sin in him -all that I saw was good!. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking or parental bias.
For me the challenge of parenting is to preserve and nurture that inherent goodness and beauty and I’m learning it’s a constant battle (with myself as much as anyone else)
QMonkey says:
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
i feel the need to say… that i don’t ‘buy’ oliver james … i just find it an interesting and well studied/presented book. not saying he’s 100% right or wrong. though… some might say its a bit of a (insert not too harsh insult) to criticise james’ level of evidence… then start talking about soul and faith
>>>For me the challenge of parenting is to preserve and nurture that inherent goodness and beauty and I’m learning it’s a constant battle (with myself as much as anyone else)
nicely put and very good way to look at it.
jaybercrow says:
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful and gracious comments guys.
As it happens, I loved the Oliver James book. I think he definitely overstates his case, but I found it provocative in a good way.
QMonkey – I basically agree that the kind of religious parenting you describe is abusive.
But I stand by the Chesterton quote. The compelling evidence for me is from my own experience, my own failure to live up to my ideals. I constantly decide what kind of parent, husband, neighbour, human being I want to be. And I constantly fall short of my aspirations. I need some kind of forgiveness and some kind of help.
Elephant – I was struck by a similar thought while reading James. Even leaving anything explicitly spiritual out of it, his thinking leaves no possibility of human beings as responsible moral agents who choose what kind of people we will be – we are either products of our genes or products of our environment. I believe both of those influences are powerful (and too often neglected by Christians) – but I still believe the glory of our humanity resides in our capacity to rebel against these limiting factors and choose the way of love and faith.
QMonkey says:
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:24 am
Let me officially thank you for the first post to catch my imagination in 2008
There’s no doubt that the nature vs nurture question whilst being very revelatory and a good way of understanding why you tend to do what you do and feel what you feel -- it can be an easy way to side step personal responsibility. But I think therapists would say that analysing your family life and knowing why you keep doing what you do is the first step to dealing with it.
You say that not living up to your ideals is compelling evidence for you? I don’t live up to my ideals either… what I do is try harder … I apply my self… apologise to people I’ve wronged and need forgiveness. There is no outside holiness required… for me its not really evidence… and I think compelling is a big word to bring to bear:)
I find the idea of ’sin’ unhelpful as it implies an outside force which makes you do bad things if you don’t let another outside force in to help you fight it … it’s not my experience that only people who have been ‘redeemed’ do good things and vice versa… I’d love to say to GKC that this is ‘obvious’ to me… because genius that he is he makes some terribly wrong assumptions which he then applies his intellect to.
Natalee Whitesell says:
January 24th, 2008 at 2:00 am
these are the things we are talking about in my small neck of the woods. enjoyed this.
Wes Whitesell says:
January 26th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
JM – Poignant thoughts, elegantly stated. Always enjoyable to hear what’s banging around inside your head. I will raise this evening’s malted beverage in a toast to you, friend. Ciao – w/e/s
David Campton says:
February 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Let me make clear from the outset… My eldest son is, frankly, wonderful… He’s just become a teenager, so he drives me up the pole like any teenage son does to his father, but over the years he has given us relatively little heartache.
However, from a very early age he revealled himself to be a very original sinner (this comment would be outrageously long for me to tell the, admittedly funny, stories) . But what he did wrong was highlighted because it was so out of “character”.
I’ve problems with the full-blown doctrine of original sin (I’m a methodist so that will surprise no-one)… But any such doctine must be set within the bounds of a good creation and a glorious redemption. That is why the fault line of sin that runs through our lives is such a contrast… It needs to be addressed, but it should not be our prime focus… be it in our parenting or our theology.
Glenn says:
February 4th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Well said Jayber. You know what really gets my goat? When people say Jesus was born to die, as if the 30-something passing years of his life on the earth was all a prelude to the cross and not a glorious participation and anointing of human existence. No wonder evangelical doctrines of creation and incarnation are so underdeveloped. We see only cross and avoidance of hell in the life of Jesus.
I wrote a reflection on this some months back. Sorry I can’t do a more tidy hyperlink than this.
http://crookedshore.typepad.com/crookedshore/2007/09/preaching-hell-.html