Tantalizing if True

Extreme repentance

The adjective extreme has become popular in recent years. People are proud of being extreme. They engage in extreme sports, listen to extreme music, and watch “Extreme Makeover.” Church youth groups even called themselves “Generation X-Treme,” which gives you an idea of how long the word has been popular in popular culture, since the oldest examples of Generation X are now over 40.

One of the appeals of extreme sports is the adrenalin rush that they give - something that’s lacking in most church activity. Sure, there are extreme short term missions and extreme street ministry, but most church people don’t engage in those. You have to leave home to try them.

Could there be such a thing as extreme repentance? What would it look like? Zaccheus might be a good biblical example. If he gave half his possessions to the poor and repaid his wrongs four times over, how much could he have left?

A nation could practice extreme repentance by dealing with sins that are too costly to seriously consider. Descendants of slaves and aboriginals have asked for it, but no governments has yet to give its land back to the previous inhabitants, or to pay back wages for forced servitude. Many people prefer to believe that the millions of people systematically killed under their nation’s wartime occupation were unavoidable, casual casualties.

What would extreme repentance look like on a personal level? It would be costly. Soldiers and tobacco farmers rarely question what they do for a living. If they do ask questions, the answer always seems to be “Fine.”

The depth of your repentance depends on what questions you’re willing to ask yourself — and how many you’re willing to answer.

Does my life line up with the Bible in every area? If not, how much do I care?
Before I came to faith, did I have any righteousness of my own?
Do other people need a savior more than I do?
Would I be willing to be called a heretic or cultist for obeying the Bible?
Are my unbelieving ancestors in hell?
Do I have any beliefs or practices that I would refuse to question if God showed me they were wrong?
Would I give up my trade or occupation if I came to believe it didn’t please God?
How far would I be willing to travel from my family’s faith if I were convinced it was false?
Could I pinpoint an area of sin, and call it sin, without knowing yet how I could be freed from it?
Does it matter if I continue to do things that displease God?

Extreme repentance requires extreme grace. For most churches, grace usually turns out to just mean that God overlooks sin. But for those who actually want to leave sin, grace needs to mean more. Grace needs to mean that God changes sinners. Otherwise, it means that God can’t or won’t or can do it only part way or only under certain circumstances. Extreme repentance requires a belief in definitive grace. We couldn’t stand to face our corruption honestly, without self-deception, if we thought we would always be corrupt.

How many times have you heard a Christian say, “Well, I really shouldn’t, but…” We often say this about dessert. I’ve been thinking about a former church, whose members sometimes said this about dessert. Even though they never said it about the Bible, when I look back, I get the sense that if we just couldn’t manage to obey the Bible right now, that would have been okay in our church. Really, if we felt we wanted to do something, nothing could have constrained us. We said we wanted to obey God in everything, and prided ourselves in that. But we could leave our wives if we felt the Spirit prompting us. A few of us did.

Wikipedia says that porn creep is about sexually explicit content entering American pop culture. It was outrageous forty years ago, but we must not complain about it now, because we might sound prudish.

It reminds me of the common arguments for why society should allow anything that was banned until now, such as homosexuals or women in combat. The common argument is not that our society would be better and happier if we didn’t ban it. The common argument is that it’s been going on for a long time. For example, historians will tell you that some women and some homosexuals have served in early American battles. Pornography has been around for thousands of years, holding an important place in many dead civilizations.

By that reasoning, everything will creep. Everything will become acceptable, given enough time.

I don’t accept that reasoning. Time can’t turn wrong into right.

Anabaptist is a name invented by the enemies of the Anabaptists. One of the names they used for themselves was “defenseless Christians.”

One of my goals is to be a defenseless Christian. All of society and most of the church spends much of its time defending itself. When we’re attacked, that’s our natural response. But I want God to be my only defense.

Unfortunately, I spend much of my time defending myself as well. But, I mean, I probably have to. What if God doesn’t come through for me? When I really need him. he might turn out to be sick or busy.

Why do we allow deliberate mistranslations of the word of God simply because we are too delicate and pure to read it?

When Isaiah says our human righteousness is like “filthy rags,” he wasn’t talking about anything you get when you change the oil in your car.

When Paul said that he counted his previous righteousness as “loss,” he wasn’t talking about anything you’ll find in the lost and found.

Pornography, if it’s defended, is defended in the name of freedom of expression. The creators of pornography, it is argued, are making an artistic statement. Okay, few defenders of pornography are willing to call it art. But they claim that pornographic performers are proud of their bodies, free from sexual hang-ups, and eager to share their worldview with the rest of us.

That makes pornography the direct counterpart of the 19th century minstrel show. Both pornography and minstrelsy depict an idealized world that doesn’t really exist. And both involve the exploitation of the people they are supposed to be depicting.
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I’m too busy following Jesus to spend much time being politically conservative. There is a difference between the two goals.

Feel free to have an opinion, even a strong opinion, about immigration and illegal aliens. But don’t call your opinion Christian if it’s not in the Bible. Leviticus, in fact, talks quite a bit about aliens. You could look there.

Don’t call your opinion about war Christian if it’s not in the Bible. Yes, many people in the past have called their war Christian, most famously the Crusaders. The Crusaders don’t count. They weren’t prophets or apostles. They weren’t inspired.

Some people believe the Kingdom of God can be advanced by killing Muslims. Some people believe it can’t. Accept it as a difference of opinion. Accept it as a difference in strategy.

The saying used to be, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” The saying among many conservatives is now, “What’s good for America is good for Jesus.”

Though American Christians may not believe that our culture is inspired, we often act like it. Some missionaries have actually helped reduce belief in the supernatural by teaching their Western worldview in contradiction to the Biblical worldview: “You don’t need to pray much about that, because we can give you a pill.”

I like what one village chieftain said when a Westerner explained that disease was not caused by evil spirits, but by germs that enter the body. He smiled and replied, “Okay, then what makes the germs enter the body?”

On a related note, some Bible teachers explain the Levitical test for an unfaithful wife by theorizing that a guilty person might be more likely to get sick.

In a real sense, the villagers had it right even before the missionaries arrived. Sickness is caused by spirits.

Most American Christians wouldn’t say they support the war in Iraq as a means of defending Christian beliefs. But certainly one of their main justifications for the war is to defend American beliefs. The Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition claimed exactly the same moral basis for their work that the Qu’ran claims for jihad (holy war) - to make our homeland safe for our faith. Now, I am not implying any other similarity between the Christian Right and Muslim jihadists. I realize that the Christian Right has not yet produced suicide bombers. But they are fighting for privileges that Jesus and Paul never had.

My recent satire on the similarities between some Muslims and Christians seems to have been misunderstood. I’ve taken four graduate courses on the relationship between Islam and Christianity, and spent hundreds of hours talking with members of both religions. But I’m still learning how to write clearly.

No, I wasn’t saying that all Christians and Muslims have destructive beliefs and attitudes in common. Just many of them. More about that tomorrow.