Wretch? Thoughts on an old hymn and a familiar gospel

Sunday in church we sang the familiar “Amazing Grace”, written by converted slave ship captain John Newton. Everyone knows the hymn. Our congregation is largely upper-middle-class, mostly made up of the baby boomer generation.

As we sang the first line, in which Newton declares his amazement at the thought that God would save “a wretch like me”, I considered whether I had been or am a wretch. I looked around, wondering how many in the congregation would identify themselves as wretches. That description seemed quite off the mark.

I have had numerous discussions with various people about the concept of “total depravity” or “original sin”, which is the idea that we are totally depraved from birth – which doesn’t mean that we always, or ever, do the worst thing we could conceive of, but that we have an inclination toward evil and, in theory, could do the worst thing we could conceive of (see Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, David Koresh, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc.). This is a fundamental pillar of Reformed theology.

Much to the bewilderment of one of my best friends, I regularly listen to podcasts and sermons of a few leading (Reformed) evangelical leaders in America. He thinks I’m nuts to do that, and perhaps I am. I like to keep up with what these people are thinking, and I always listen for the theological underpinnings as I contrast them to how I understand the gospel now.

Sunday evening, I listened to that morning’s sermon from Matt Chandler, lead pastor of The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas. He has grown that church to mega size over the last 25 years, and is himself one of the nation’s leading Reformed and evangelical voices.

His sermon was titled “The Gospel in Past, Present, and Future,” which title intrigued me, especially after the thoughts of that same morning. He was attempting to, as he said it, preach “a very clear, straightforward gospel.” What is the good news for a wretch?

Several things struck me, which I will note in summary fashion. I searched through the transcript looking for relevant quotes. I will footnote those quotes so you have access to them, without cluttering up the text.

Here we go:

1.     Chandler defines God’s holiness as morality.[1] God’s holiness consists of being morally pure – holding to an absolute standard, a benchmark of behavior. He views holiness through through a legal and courtroom lens.

2.     Flowing from that is the “wretched” idea. In contrast to God, we are fundamentally flawed and sinful, devoid of any lasting worth without divine intervention, perhaps not even loveable.[2]

3.     That divine intervention comes through a transaction.[3] There is an infinite moral debt which must be paid by the God/man Jesus. Essential to that transaction is the spilling of blood – violence.[4]

4.     The focus is almost exclusively on the individual. The recipient of that sacrifice is the individual: Christ pays our personal outstanding debt.[5] 

5.     An us versus them separation is created: those who have received this transaction and those who have not.[6] 

6.     The goal is to get the individual safely home to glory.[7] The final and true meaning of “being saved” is that we arrive in heaven, where we are freed from our moral imperfections, forever escaping the condition of “wretch”.

I suspect that these themes, as I summarize them, are not recognized by the large majority of Chandler’s listeners. They are so deeply embedded in our paradigms that we don’t even notice them.

All of these themes contain good truth. There are real moral standards. We can be pretty desperately wicked people, even the best of us. Forgiveness does carry a real cost. The individual really matters. Whatever one’s understanding of the final destination is, we all want to get there safely, and we realize that, for the most part, we can’t do it on our own.

But: holiness is much more than a moral standard. Each of us is of infinite value and worthy of being loved regardless of our level of moral purity, and before we straighten up and fly right. Love is the heart of relationship, not transaction. Violence is of the evil one. None of us is free, or saved, until all of us are free. We are all on this journey together. Our hope lies in the confidence that we will find our place in this world which has been created and is loved by God and which He has promised to make new.

I am understanding more and more that the way we conduct ourselves as individuals and as a society is deeply rooted in the theological framework which forms our worldview, even if most of us cannot say what our worldview is. It determines how we act and how we respond to the environment around us. More potently, our theological framework drives our culture in every possible way, producing its fruit.

We can pick good fruit from Chandler’s gospel: it defeats the power of performance-based worth, it breaks through secrecy and the accompanying shame, it demands that the individual take accountability, and it provides stability and hope in crisis.

There is also some bad fruit: it devalues the physical world, it stimulates the neglect of the created world, it promotes consumer discipleship, it breeds toxic exclusivity, it misunderstands the purpose and role of community, it downplays the idea of systematic evil and injustice, and it is escapist in its direction.

Underlying all of this is Chandler’s interpretive approach to the text. He tends to bypass the original audiences, the Roman Empire backdrop, the social, economic, and political forces at play, and the Jewish–Gentile tensions so central to the New Testament story, to drive toward God’s good news for me. The text is treated as disembodied affirmations meant to fit our modern American context.

There is a lot here which could fill many pages and books-and, for sure, already has.

I have lived and breathed Chandler’s paradigm for a good part of my life. I am learning how to recognize the bad fruit and find God’s good news for that part of the garden. It’s a slow journey - one that requires unmasking the assumptions of a message like Chandler’s, and then growing to understand and experience more deeply what Paul calls the immeasurably wide, long, high, and deep love of Christ.

The 13^th century Persian poet and mystic Rumi, one of those John 1:9 recognizes as having been enlightened by the Light that has come into the world, writes about the Love in this way:

You wake the dead to life,

you fountain of grace,

you fire in thickets of tangled thought.

Today you arrived beaming with laughter—

that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.

You are hope’s beating heart.

You are a doorway to the sun.

You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me.

Beginning and end.

You greet need with generous hands.

You flood us with spirit,

rising from the heart,

lifting thought.

Rare one, you reveal the pleasure

of wisdom and practice.

Beyond these, what is there

[1] “And so if I could define holiness for you, this is how I would define it: holiness, God's holiness, is wholeness, entireness, perfect in a moral sense.”; “God's love sent the Son to solve what problem? The gap between God's holiness and our sinfulness..."; "Our position before God in Christ, like how He sees us, is morally perfect. That that's how He sees us through the blood of Christ..."

[2] "Sin leading unto death... actually works more like what's called heart rot in trees... and what ends up happening is because they're rotting from the inside out, eventually the tree just collapses upon itself with no warning... everything else is like putting diesel in an unleaded; it's going to break down."; "All the rue that went into my upbringing had me convinced at the core of my being that I was useful, but not necessarily lovable... if I can't build, if I can't overcome, then I'm unlovable. That's heart rot."; "Like if He was just a little dirty, then our little dirty wouldn't matter. But He's infinitely pure, which makes His holiness a real problem for our sinfulness...”

[3] "And then He's resurrected on the third day as evidence that the bill has been paid in full."; "And then this is my experience both as a Christian and as a pastor: most of us... received Christ with gladness and then almost immediately began to try to work and earn what was freely given to us."

[4] "None of this would be possible without the blood of Jesus...”

[5] For quotes to back this up I would need to insert the entire transcript. There is, to my remembrance, no mention of the community in the gospel message except as a place for the individual to find support, be challenged and assisted in his or her Christian walk. The community is a means rather than an end.

[6] "‘Which you received’—that's past tense. It's a past happening that occurred in your life if you're a Christian. If you're not a Christian, you have yet to receive. I'm hoping maybe today will be the day of salvation..."; "We provide communion primarily for our members, but if you're a believer in Christ in good standing with the church you're visiting us from, join us at the table... If you're here this morning not a Christian, trying to get to the bottom of all of this, still got some questions... communion belongs to the saints. It's our celebration of our union with Christ. And if that's not where you are yet, will you do me a favor? Will you just abstain? This is the only thing that we do that we're saying not this. Participate in everything else, but not this."

[7] "I have not yet stopped stumbling along the way. I'm almost ready—I'm going to give it a, you know, another decade or so—but I'm almost ready to just go, 'You're stumbling all the way to glory.'"; "Do you think He is growing weary at holding you up? Do you think He will become a liar, or do you not know that He'll hold you? That He has promised by His own name to get you safely home."; "For God loved the world in this way: He gave His one and only Son that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life."