I read this piece entitled Reformed-Masochism a few days ago and a conversation with a colleague reminded me of it. The article essentially notes that in his experience of Reformed communities a sermon, lesson, or presentation was evaluated based on how “convicted” it made members of the group feel. The more guilty you felt when you left the better you felt about the entire experience. The author suspected something is wrong with this, and I think he’s right. That wasn’t my experience growing up in a Christian Reformed Church, but most of the CRCs I grew up in were not “normal” so I can’t testify one way or the other regarding the CRC. I have seen this dynamic, however.

Some might try to defend this based on the second question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism. Sometimes the structure of the catechism is alliterated as “Guilt, Grace, Gratitude”. I don’t like that scheme as much as “Misery, Deliverance, Gratitude” even though there isn’t alliteration. Why? Our misery is broader than our guilt.

Guilt can be understood objectively and subjectively. Objectively when a judge pronounces a suspect “guilty”, that is a legal status that is pronounced upon a person. Subjectively most of us understand guilt to be an emotional recognition of moral or personal failure either to a standard but most often with respect to a relationship.

Ron Nydam, the professor of Pastoral Care at Calvin Seminary has often stated that for this present generation of young adults (subjective) guilt is an acheivement, not a liability. Culturally we have done a lot of work to reduce the levels of experiential guilt in people’s lives. A couple of months ago I remember an illustration from a Tim Keller sermon where he noted that someone in a novel expressed the idea that his lack of experience of (subjective) guilt was increasingly troublesome because the presence of subjective guilt indicated that in this person’s life there existed apart from himself meaning and a moral universe. His insight was that to not experience emotional guilt was to be disconnected from a larger, meaningful whole. (This was in Tim Keller’s Easter sermon 2009. The illustrations on this point start around minute 11 in the sermon. )Someone who is completely guilt free is quite likely so narcissistic that they will little more than an selfish, self-absorbed, angry center.

At the same time, the subtle shift from “misery” to “guilt” in the understanding of the second Q/A of the catechism is a problem. We don’t just suffer from guilt. To a degree a lack of experiential guilt is a trouble sign that a person has lost contact with a larger moral universe, yet we misery is a far broader term and awareness of misery puts us in contact with much other loss within the age of decay that we should be aware of. Guilt is a subset of misery.

Part of what this Reformed Masochism reflects is an assumption that the only path to understanding the blessings of deliverance (second step in hc q/a 2) is first going through guilt. That isn’t necessarily so. I don’t want to downplay the truth that often we can not be mentally, experientially delivered from all we are enslaved by (see past postings on sin) until we begin to understand how deep our enslavement goes and how lost our predicament is. Our experience of God’s deliverance of us is deeply tied to our lost estate but guilt is only one of the senses available to us through which we experience that lost estate.

It is probably true that the aspect of our misery that provides the most efficacious insight of our lost condition is likely culturally contextual. Note in Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 the punchline Peter delivers to the diaspora Jews gathered on Pentecost was that Yhwh’s servant had come to them in Jerusalem and they turned him over to the Gentiles to be killed. This in Acts 2 caused an immediate and passionate reaction of horror and guilt. Paul’s sermon in Acts 17 in Athens doesn’t play to or assume any guilt (as an experience of moral failure) at all.

Recently Internet Monk gathered a group of pastors, a number of which were church planters, from different denominations and asked them to briefly present the gospel. What they delivered is noteworthy on this regard. I don’t recall any of them starting from guilt or making it the center piece of their presentation. They tended to work on other aspects of lostness that are experiential. Whether conciously or unconciously all of these pastors instinctively knew that their audience isn’t itching about guilt. This is a departure from an assumption among many who would assert that before you can deliver “good news” (satisfaction addressing our moral debt) you must first establish the bad news (the reality of your moral debt). Many “gospel presentations” have taken this approach and instinctively people who are actively doing evangelism has seen that this doesn’t get traction in a generation for whom delivery from moral guilt is not a large felt need.

I do not want to overplay this point, however, because I think  we’re going to likely see a larger backlash against blue-state-moralism as this takes hold culturally and coming generations tend to rebel against the previous stakeholders. Lots of blue-state-moralism can get very preachy, legalistic and holier-than-thou with respect to a great number of behaviors despite their desire to not be judgmental. I don’t expect the experiential guilt market to evaporate completely. It will likely just re-morph in some different ways.

The Reformed Masochism article was right to challenge this tradition. There is nothing wrong with preaching that convicts us of our sin and helps us come to terms emotionally with our failures, moral and otherwise, yet the task of the preacher is ultimately to offer good news, that in fact deliverance has been completed and that our experience of this deliverance propels us towards the coming resurrection in service that labors not in vain. There are also other paths to having the eyes of our heart enlightened to the glorious inheritance that is our hope. Lately I’ve been working more on the themes of deliverance from the age of decay and joy in the new relational polarity of the life of God.