Blessed are the pure in heart Austere country, this, scrubbed By spring’s ravaging avalanche. Talus slope and Appekunny Mudstone make a meadow where High-country beargrass gathers light From lichen, rock, and icy tarn, Changing sun’s lethal rays To food for grizzlies, drink for bees Heart-pure creatures living blessed Under the shining of God’s face. Yet, like us the far-fallen, Neither can they look on the face And live. Every blossom’s a breast Holding eventual sight for all blind and Groping newborn: we touch our way Through these splendors to the glory.
Atug of war takes place every week between pastor and people. The contest is over conflicting views of the person who comes to church. The result of the struggle is exhibited in the service of worship, shaping sermon and prayers, influencing gesture and tone.
People (and particularly people who come to church and put themselves in touch with pastoral ministry) see themselves in human and moral terms: they have human needs that need fulfilling and moral deficiencies that need correcting. Pastors see people quite differently. We see them in theological terms: they are sinners persons separated from God who need to be restored in Christ.
These two views the pastor’s theological understanding of people and the people’s self-understanding are almost always in tension.
Seeing People as Sinners
The word sinner is a theological designation. It is essential to insist on this. It is not a moralistic judgment. It is not a word that places humans somewhere along a continuum ranging from angel to ape, assessing them as relatively good or bad. It designates humans in relation to God and sees them separated from God. Sinner means something is awry between humans and God. In that state people may be wicked, unhappy, anxious, and poor. Or, they may be virtuous, happy, and affluent. Those items are not part of the judgment. The theological fact is that humans are not close to God and are not serving God.
To see a person as sinner, then, is not to see him or her as hypocritical, disgusting, or evil. Most sinners are very nice people. To call a man a sinner is not a blast at his manners or his morals. It is a theological belief that the thing that matters most to him is forgiveness and grace.
If a pastor finds himself resenting his people, getting petulant and haranguing them, that is a sign that he or she has quit thinking of them as sinners who bring nothing in themselves of worth and has secretly invested them with divine attributes of love, strength, compassion, and joy. They, of course, do not have these attributes in any mature measure and so will disappoint him or her every time. On the other hand, if the pastor rigorously defines people as fellow sinners, he or she will be prepared to share grief, shortcomings, pain, failure, and have plenty of time left over to watch for the signs of God’s grace operating in this wilderness, and then fill the air with praises for what he discovers.
An understanding of people as sinners enables a pastoral ministry to function without anger. Accumulated resentment (a constant threat to pastors) is dissolved when unreal that is, untheological presuppositions are abandoned. If people are sinners then pastors can concentrate on talking about God’s action in Jesus Christ instead of sitting around lamenting how bad the people are. We already know they can’t make it. We already have accepted their depravity. We didn’t engage to be pastor to relax in their care or entrust ourselves to their saintly ways. Cursed be he that trusteth in man, even if he be a pious man, or, perhaps, particularly if he be a pious man (Reinhold Niebuhr). We have come among the people to talk about Jesus Christ. Grace is the main subject of pastoral conversation and preaching. Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more (Romans 5:20).
But a pastor is not likely to find this view of people supported by the people themselves. They ordinarily assume that everyone has a divine inner core that needs awakening. They’re Emersonian in their presuppositions, not Pauline. They expect personal help from the pastor in the shape of moralistic, mystic, or intellectual endeavors. People don’t reckon with sin as that total fact that characterizes them; nor do they long for forgiveness as the effective remedy. They yearn for the nurture of their psychic life, for a way in which they may bypass grace and walk on their own. They are frequently noble and sincere in their approach as they ask the pastor to believe in them and their inner resources and possibilities. The pastor can easily be moved to accommodate such self-understanding. But it is a way without grace. The pastor must not give in. This road must be blocked. The Word of God to which pastoral ministry is committed loses propinquity the moment a person is not understood as a sinner.
The happy result of a theological understanding of people as sinners is that the pastor is saved from continual surprise that they are in fact sinners. It enables us to heed Bonhoeffer’s admonition: A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men. So sinner becomes not a weapon in an arsenal of condemnation, but the expectation of grace. Simply to be against sin is a poor basis for pastoral ministry. But to see people as sinners as rebels against God, missers of the mark, wanderers from the way that establishes a basis for pastoral ministry that can proceed with great joy because it is announcing God’s great action in Jesus Christ for sinners.
Discerning Sin’s Particular Forms
There is more to it, though, than establishing a theological viewpoint. If the pastor first of all has to be a theologian in order to see people accurately, he or she must quickly acquire pastoral insights into the particular way sin expresses itself. Sin, for pastors, does not remain a theological rubric; it takes on specific human forms that call out specific pastoral responses. There is a great peril in conveying too abstract an idea of it. Sin is not simply a failure in relation to God that can be studied lexically; it is a personal deviation from God’s will. Pastors deal with stories, not definitions, of sin. The pastor enters the world of the local and the personal. He or she seeks to establish in the language and images of everyday life the bare fact that the Christian life is possible within the chronological boundaries of a person’s life and in the geographical vicinity of his or her street address.
So however necessary it is to have a theological understanding of people as sinners, the pastor is not ready for ministry until he or she finds the particular forms that sin takes in individual histories. The pastor presses for details. He (or she) is interested in exactly how people are sinners. That they are sinners he accepts as a presupposition he wouldn’t be preaching the foolishness of the cross if he hadn’t accepted that. But there are different ways of being a sinner. Pastoral ministry increases in effectiveness as it discerns and discriminates among the forms of sin, and then loves, prays, witnesses, converses, and preaches the details of grace appropriate to each human face that takes shape in the pew.
Episodes of Adolescence
Each generation is, in poet John Berryman’s words, unwell in a new way. The way in which the present generation is unwell that is, the forms under which it experiences sin is through episodes of adolescence. There was a time when ideas and living styles were initiated in the adult world and filtered down to youth. Now the movement goes the other way: lifestyles are generated at the youth level and pushed upward. Dress fashions, hair styles, music, and morals that are adopted by youth are evangelically pushed on an adult world, which in turn seems eager to be converted. Youth culture began as a kind of fad and then grew into a movement. Today it is nearly fascist in its influence, forcing its perceptions and styles on everyone whether he likes it or not.
This observation helps plot a pastoral understanding of people. There is a miasmic spread of the adolescent experience upward through the generations. Instead of being over and done with when the twenty-first birthday is reached, it infects the upper generations as well. It is common to see adults in their thirties, forties, and fifties who have not only adopted the external trappings of the youth culture but are actually experiencing the emotions, traumas, and difficulties typical of youth. They are experiencing life under its adolescent forms. The sins of the sons, it seems, are being visited upon the fathers.
Reference to two adolescent characteristics will illustrate this way of understanding people in pastoral ministry.
The Sense of Inadequacy
The first is a sense of inadequacy. People don’t feel they are very good at the Christian life. They are apologetic and defensive about their faith.
A feeling of inadequacy is characteristic of adolescent life. When a person is growing rapidly on all fronts physical, emotional, mental he or she is left without competence in anything. Life doesn’t slow down long enough for him to gain a sense of mastery. The teenager has a variety of devices to disguise this feeling: he can mask it with braggadocio, submerge it in a crowd of peers, or develop a subcult of language and dress in which he maintains superiority by excluding the larger world from his special competence. The variations are endless; the situation is the same: the adolescent is immature, and therefore inadequate. And he is acutely self-conscious about this inadequacy.
This is exactly what the pastor meets in people of all ages in the church. They feel they aren’t making it as Christians. This is a bit of surprise because in the past the Christian church has more often had to deal with the Pharisee the person who feels he achieved adequacy long ago. People today are much more apt to be uneasy and fearful about their Christian identity.
The ostensible reason is that the new world is changing so fast that no one gets a chance to feel at home in it. The adult, like the adolescent, is confronted with a new world every week or so and doesn’t feel that he or she can cope. When this adult enters the church, he or she looks at the pastor and supposes that the minister, at least, has feet on the ground and knows where things are. People look at the pastor as the person with competence in things that have to do with God and cast him or her in the role of expert. That process seems natural and innocent as natural and innocent as the feelings of inadequacy in the adolescent and his consequent admiration of competence. It is more likely, though, a new disguise for an old sin the ancient business of making idols. God calls people to himself, but they turn away to something less than God, fashioning a religious experience but avoiding God. The excuse is that they are inadequate for facing the real thing. They proceed with the awareness that, far from sinning, they have acquired the virtue of humility. But the theological nose smells idolatry.
Some pastors take deliberate steps to counteract their image as substitute God by sprinkling profanity through their syntax and quoting Playboy magazine. They say, in effect, to the people, I am no more adequate than you are. Don’t look to me as any kind of saint; don’t model your life on what I am doing. But pastoral ministry must consist of something other than disclaimers.
There is a Pauline technique for dealing with this sense of inadequacy. Writing to the Ephesians, Paul says: For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers (Ephesians 1:15-16). Assuming that the Ephesian church had the same percentage of sinners in it as modern ones do (namely, 100 percent), it would be a mistake to envy Paul his congregation, a congregation that it was possible to address so gratefully. It is better to admire Paul’s ability to see God’s action in those people. Paul had a meticulous eye for the signs of grace. He was God’s spy, searching out the congregational terrain for evidence that the Holy Spirit had been there. Paul knew the people were sinners. But his passion was for describing grace and opening their eyes to what his eyes were open to the activity of God in their lives, his power in us who believe (Ephesians 5:21).
If the pastor sees inadequacy as an unfortunate feeling, he or she will use psychological and moral means to remove it. If he sees it as a sign of sin an avoidance of personal responsibility in the awesome task of facing God in Christ he will respond by kindly and gently presenting the living God, pointing out the ways in which God is alive in the community. The instances of courage and grace that occur every week in any congregation are staggering. Pastoral discernment that sees grace operating in a person keeps that person in touch with the living God.
Historical Amnesia
Another characteristic of the adolescent that has spread into the larger population is the absence of historical sense. The adolescent, of course, has no history. He or she has a childhood, but no accumulation of experience that transcends personal details and produces a sense of history. His world is highly personal and extremely empirical.
As a consequence, the teenager is incredibly gullible. We suppose that a person educated in fine schools by well-trained teachers would not be in any danger of superstition. We further suppose that the fact-demanding, scientific-oriented education that prevails in our schools would have sharpened the minds of the young to be perceptive in matters of evidence and logic. It doesn’t happen. The reason it doesn’t happen is that they have no feeling for the past, for precedents and traditions, and so have no perspective in making judgments or discerning values. They may know the facts of history and read historical novels by the dozen, but they don’t feel history in their bones. It is not their history. The result is that they begin every problem from scratch. There is no feeling of being part of a living tradition that already has some answers worked out and some procedures worth repeating.
This state of mind, typical in adolescence, is, within certain parameters, accepted. The odd thing today is that there is no change when a person reaches adult years. The way this ahistorical anemia has become an adult trait was evident in the first landing on the moon. Everyone was caught up in a rush of historical speculation, including President Nixon himself, who rather recklessly declared it to be the most important day in human history, thereby scandalizing his spiritual director Billy Graham by forgetting so easily the birth of Christ. When these same people come to church, the pastor discovers that they have little consciousness of being part of a community that carries in its Scriptures, its worship, and its forms of obedience a life twenty and more centuries in the making.
Such people are subject to consistent trivialization. They find it impossible to tell what may be important. They buy things, both material and spiritual, that they will never use. They hear the same lies over and over again without ever becoming angry. They are led to entertain, and for brief times practice, all kinds of religious commitment from magazine moralisms to occultic séances. In none of it do they show any particular perseverance. But neither do they show much sign of wising up of developing a historical sense, of becoming conscious that they are part of a continuing people of God and growing beyond the adolescent susceptibilities to novelty and fantasy.
If the pastor interprets this as a form of cultural deprivation, he or she will become a pedagogue, trying to teach the people who they are as Christians, extending their memory backward. But that would be a mistake, for it is not basically a cultural condition. What begins as a normal characteristic of adolescence, when stretched into Christian adulthood, becomes a clever ruse (largely unconscious) for masking sin: the sin is a denial of dependence on God and interdependence among neighbors, a refusal to be a people of God and a counterinsistence that the individual ego be treated as something godlike. In the Garden of Eden the decision to substitute firsthand experience for obedience to the command of God produced in a single generation a murder that revealed its loss of history and community in the flip but exceedingly lonely question, Am I my brother’s keeper?
Ezekiel was pastor to a similarly constituted people, who by refusing to be responsible to God and each other had lost a sense of history. His ministry provides insight into a style of pastoral response. Israel was severed from its roots, the old rituals and traditions didn’t appear to have relevance in the land of exile, and people were easy prey to their heathen environment. Everyone was subject to the temptation to try to make it on his or her own, fashioning a religion out of personal basic survival needs. In this time of need, what Ezekiel did not do was start a school and teach history lessons. Rather he preached a new life, exposed the nature of the people’s sin, and appealed to their conscience to be made into a new people by God’s grace. A foundation was established in the covenant life of the people of God that, in contrast to the cultural and economic conceptions of the ancient East (and modern West!), protected the divine value of every person, showing a way of salvation and promising a future. People were asked to let themselves be taken into personal relationships of service and loyalty to the God who releases them from the chain of guilt down the generations and gives them a new start by forgiving them and then guaranteeing them a life and a future. They were reinserted into a community with a history.
Undoubtedly this development first took place in the prophet’s own house where the elders (Ezekiel 8:1; Ezekiel 12:9; Ezekiel 14:1; Ezekiel 20:1; Ezekiel 24:19) and other members of the colony in Babylon (Romans 33:30-33) gathered in order to hear some word from God or obtain advice about various problems. Many were superficial and came merely out of curiosity, but that did not prevent the prophet from finding some who responded to his appeal for a decision to repent and be made new by God. As a result, in meetings that had previously been held in order to keep up and preserve ancient, inherited spiritual possessions, hopelessly trying to defend against the loss of history that the exile produced, the Holy Spirit brought new expectations and resolutions to life. A new community was established with a lively sense of the past recast in bright visions of the future (chaps. 40-48). Ezekiel saw that the problem among the people was not historical ignorance, although they were ignorant that way. Perceptively, he diagnosed the sin that was using loss of history as a front, and convincingly preached a word of grace.
The Quick Theological Eye
The people encountered in pastoral ministry today are sinners. But they don’t look like it, and many of them don’t even act like it. They rather look and act and feel like the youth they admire so much, struggling for identity and searching for integrity. A quick theological eye that is able to pick up the movements of sin hiding behind these seemingly innocent characteristics will keep a pastor on track, doing what he or she was called to do: sharing a ministry of grace and forgiveness centered in Jesus Christ.
Copyright ©1989 Christianity Today
