Confusing theology with self-esteem

My kids have a video from Max Lucado’s Hermie series about a stink-bug named Stanley.  Stanley is upset because God made him stinky, and no one wants to be around him.  God tells Stanley that He made him that way for a reason and he does not make mistakes.  At the end of the show, after a lot of angst on the part of Stanley (and all of the other characters trying to deal with the fact that Stanley stinks), there is a wonderful opportunity for everyone to celebrate that Stanley is a stink-bug because his smell saves the day.

Veggie-Tales usually has a similar theme: You are who God made you to be, and that is all that matters.  Don’t let other people tease you or make you feel bad.  “God made you special and He loves you very much.”

These self-esteem messages to kids do have their place, but when this is the only theology that kids (or their parents for that matter) receive, it becomes detrimental to the faith.  Let me explain.  If I were to take these affirmations of my own self-worth as theological truths (God made me how I am and loves me very much), then there is no problem whatsoever with a whole host of inclinations I may have.  I am a thief.  I am gay.  I am a womanizer.  I am greedy.  I am lazy.  I am a glutton.  But God made me this way, so it must not be a sin, therefore I am going to read the Bible and all theology through the lense of my personal internal struggle as being a struggle with societal expectations of me, and not sin–because God made me this way!

Do you see where this is going.  Right now in the United Methodist Church the debate is about homosexuality, and the argument is usually that God created people in this fashion because “they have always felt this way.”  Therefore God is the cause of the homosexual attraction and, since God cannot make or create sin, homosexual attraction must not be sin.  And if that is not sin, then those passages in the Bible and Church history that portray homosexuality as sin must be reinterpreted to fit the feelings I have always had.  This is bad theology and a very, very slippery slope.

If we did not live in a world that has sin in it, I would agree that however someone has always felt must be the way God intended it to be.  But we live in a world where individuals have also grown up and always felt selfish and greedy, ready to exploit others for their own personal gain.  We live in a world where individuals have always felt self-loathing and cut themselves.  We live in a world where individuals do not get the chance to grow up beacuse they died moments after birth due to a defect in their genetic make-up.  And God did not intend these to happen.  They occur because we exist in a cosmos that is in need of redemption, and that cosmos includes our feelings and our natures.

I am a big fan of St. Patrick and I love the prayer attributed to him.  There is one portion of it that usually gets left out of most of the abreviated versions in print for Protestants.  It comes before the famous “Christ before me; Christ behind me…” passage.  It prays:

I arise today

through God’s strength to pilot me:

God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me,

God’s eye to look before me, God’s ear to hear me,

God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to guard me,

God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me,

God’s host to secure me:

against snares of devils,

against temptations of vices,

against inclinations of nature,

against everyone who shall wish me ill,

afar and anear, alone and in a crowd

Please note “against temptations of vices, against inclinations of nature…”  Patrick and the Celtic Church Tradition he helped to found understood well the inner struggles with sin that we all have, a struggle that is always there from as long as we can remember in our lives.

The United Methodist Church would do well to recapture this theological point, rather than the self-esteem affirmations we peddle to kids, as foundational for our understanding of sin and salvation.

If you would like to read the entire Prayer of St. Patrick, it is found here.

~ by stevebruns on July 23, 2008.