In our quest for self-righteousness, sometimes, we’ll even go so far as to enlist the help of God to fulfil our own self-righteous plan to be like God. And this subtle teaching, I’m afraid to say, is too prevalent in Christianity.
This is part 3 of my experimental podcast reading from my book “Holy Sin” - a book about coming back down to earth on the question of living a holy life as a Christian.
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Since the early days of Christianity, we combined Aristotle and Greek philosophical approaches to virtue with scriptural exhortations to live a holy life. Aristotle, like most of the early philosophers, was concerned with how to be human in the world and achieve the good life. However, I think many Christians confused "holiness" with "the good life", believing that they are one and the same. So we took an Aristotelian view of creating holiness. As Aristotle taught that if you do the right thing repeatedly it would become a habit - by “doing just things we become just” as he put it, and that the path of virtue requires commitment and exertion; and the path of virtue is the path to happiness - so we really say the same thing. It's true that the classical virtues lead to the best outcomes in life, as even the psychologists have discovered in the branch of Positive Psychology today, but this isn't quite the same thing as "holiness" or righteousness, or living the Christian life of perfect love.
Many times as Christians we'll add the idea that God has given His Spirit to “help” us in our self-righteous endeavor to become righteous in ourselves. We treat the Spirit of God like some sort of power-tool that we are ultimately responsible for using. We’ll often even imply that if we’re not practicing the things of the Spirit enough then God is not happy, meaning that our ‘practicing’ or ‘putting into action’ or ‘making adjustments’ acts as some kind of merit before God. We say things like, “Justification is His part, but sanctification is yours,” or, “feed the Spirit, starve the flesh,” and so on. All this reiterates the strange idea that sin can be dealt with if you just approach it with a bit of willpower and make adjustments to some of your habits, and downplays the sheer miraculous power of God that destroys evil and the mysterious and liberating truth of us being in Christ and Christ being in us, and Jesus becoming our righteousness.
Jesus is central to holiness and righteousness and this is how it will always be. We cannot use Jesus or the Spirit or the Father as some guiding principle, some mechanic that we can activate through faith or doctrine or belief or a lifestyle choice. Jesus refuses to be a principle but insists on being a person, and this is one of the reasons why much of our theology on holiness results in a lack of fruit--because we don’t see Jesus as a person to be known, but rather as a mechanism to help us in our quest to be righteous and holy ourselves and keep eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
But to downplay our arrogance we pull a different card out. All the while that we encourage people to mix the Spirit and their willpower in some way to be holy, we also say that we are all, whether we have come to faith in Christ or not, inherently sinful and will always sin. So on the one hand we tell people that they must practice good deeds and spiritual things to become good (what we really mean is ‘praiseworthy examples of human excellence’) but on the other hand we tell them to remember that they will always sin. Is it any wonder that so many Christians are confused and live in despair, even jettisoning their faith? We are effectively telling ourselves that we must labor and fight against something that we also say we can never beat. To counteract our arrogance we injected a bit of false humility.
But it’s time to question the entire human endeavor toward righteousness itself. Because righteousness is not achieved through striving to get it, but righteousness is given through faith in the Righteous One of all--Jesus. Faith in Jesus, which is not a static faith but a dynamic, ongoing relational reality, is what connects us to the Holy Spirit. As Martin Luther says: "Iron exposed to fire glows like fire, on account of its union with the fire." It is only in our union with Christ that we become like Christ, not in our striving to become like Christ.
Let me be more clear. What I am saying is we should not strive to become like Christ. This sounds very controversial, doesn’t it? But the emphasis is on the word ‘strive’. Christ-likeness is something God gives to us, it’s not something we can achieve. It’s not something we also get for being good people, because then it would be something you achieve. We do not strive to live a life of where we can become righteous. Rather, our striving is to live a life of faith in Jesus. That faith is what connects us to the Holy Spirit; it’s what creates a union with God; so that we do not become righteous in ourselves but become one with the Holy One. That unity is what makes us righteous - an imputed righteousness. This imputed righteousness and that unity moves our hearts towards love. Love is an active thing. It’s God’s righteousness (not ours) in action. Christianity is not about the old nature getting better, but of receiving an entirely new nature from the Holy Spirit. This is not done by practicing virtue but by practicing faith. Only then are we perfected in love.
Adding virtues to our faith
But what about scriptures, for example, where Peter exhorts us in 2 Peter 1 to add virtues to our faith (2 Peter 1:5)? Well, we must look carefully at these sorts of scriptures before allowing our old man to make assumptions about how we must now strive for righteousness. If we look at those verses, we see it is in the context of having already received God's promises, and having already escaped the "worldly corruption that is produced by evil desire" (as verse 4 puts it) - all given because of the one who called us by his own glory and virtue (see verse 3. And by the way, the ESV translates this incorrectly). Through the promises given, the promises of the Holy Spirit, and the faithfulness of Christ that leads to forgiveness of sin, we become partakers of God's very divine nature (as verse 4 says). We then supplement our faith with virtue, self-control, steadfastness, affection, and ultimately with love so we can remain productive and fruitful for the Lord (see verse 6 - 8). This is because it's not God who needs our good works, but our neighbor. The practice of virtue is not for the sake of becoming a righteous person, but to become an effective person in the world. When our righteousness is found in Christ and we stop striving to be righteous, we are free to be effective.
There is a right way to love in this world. It's a matter of doing excellent things excellently, not so that we may be trophies for God, or so that we can take pride in ourselves, but so that we may be effective for God's Kingdom work in a world that needs light; in a world that needs change. Being an effective Christian has everything to do with the mission God has for this world, but has nothing to do with our own righteousness. If our righteousness is in Christ; if we are united to Him through the Holy Spirit, which happens by faith; we are free to work on virtue for the sake of others; and when we fail, we understand that that is just part of the journey.
This is why we can't achieve God's purposes in this world through religious laws, or even worldly legislation.
Using Godly principles to be self-righteous
We seldom make the link between the New Testament’s warnings against using God's law to become righteous (the book of Galatians, specifically) and our attempts at being righteous by following certain rules or codes or doing certain works of righteousness or thinking of the Spirit in mechanical terms; or the myriad of other ways in which we teach the value of human striving toward righteousness. What is particularly interesting about this is that, if you’re a Protestant, the Reformation hung on this--that righteousness is from God and not from ourselves, because we are simply unable to be righteous at all. But today Protestants have largely forgotten this in practice. We mostly try and attend to our outward behavior in the vain hope that this will adjust our desires, yet we also believe that our desires can never truly be adjusted. Or we believe they can, but it’s up to us to do the adjusting. But we never think about the desire to be righteous in the first place and question what our real motive behind this desire is, as this desire often sends us back to law. And law sparks off our other sins. “But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.” (Romans 7:8.)
This isn’t new. The Church has, throughout history, officially condemned the idea of exercising our human willpower over sin, but in practice it’s often a very different story. Many teach against the heresy of “Pelagianism” or “semi-Pelagianism”, the idea that there is some good in us that’s capable of following and doing God’s commandments, but in actuality we teach the same thing, claiming that we don’t because we say “we have the Spirit so we can do it!” This is still the wrong way to think of the Spirit’s work. Today we are bombarded with books and teachings that convince us that we can fight the battle against sin if we simply put certain “Biblical” principles in place and make the right adjustments. Think about the titles you see at any book store: Ten Keys for Marriage Success; Principles for Prosperity; and so on. Others ignore all that but are so focused on injustice that they completely forget the root cause of injustice: our self-righteousness. We don’t really question the inherent propensity in us to want to climb a ladder of spirituality and become righteous in ourselves, assuming the agenda of progressing in our righteousness is also God’s agenda. That want and inner propensity, the Old Man, will always lead us to some form of Pelagian position. If we don’t realize the old man has died in Christ and we don’t come to terms with the miraculous truth of us being new creatures in Christ, and if we don’t live in that reality, we’re always going to live according to the Old Man’s conundrum--knowing good and evil, and yet not being able to do anything about it, while lying to ourselves that we can do something about it. The pendulum swing between ‘try harder’ and ‘I’m a victim of the sinful nature’ will always be the place we live. Until we question the agenda itself we’re always going to be scratching our heads about sin. When the Church forgets Jesus’ clear message against self-righteousness it loses its identity.
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