Sin, preaching, and the therapeutic gospel

Regular readers will have noticed a regular theme, or convergence of themes, on the blog over the last few years. In a phrase, the theme is the question of how to be and to do church in a therapeutic age. This question includes a range of issues: evangelism, liturgy, sacraments, preaching, class, education, literacy, exegesis, culture, technology, disenchantment, secularism, functional atheism, and more.

Three constant conversation partners are Richard Beck, Alan Jacobs, and Jake Meador (the persons and the blogs!). A fourth is my friend Myles Werntz, whom I’ve known for more than a decade, whom I’ve had as a fellow Abilenian for more than five years, and whom I’ve had as a colleague at ACU for almost three years. His Substack is called “Christian Ethics in the Wild.” You should subscribe!

His latest issue is on holiness, prompted by a conversation with an undergraduate student. The student earnestly asked him the following: Why doesn’t anyone—at church or university—ever talk about sin? Neither the student nor Myles is sin-obsessed. They just find themselves wondering about the fact that, and why, sin-talk is in retreat.

They’re right to do so. Sin is a byword these days. There are many reasons why. Much has to do with generational baggage. Boomers, Gen X, and even some older Millennials do not want to reproduce what they understand themselves to have received: namely, an imbalanced spiritual formation, whereby believers of every age, but especially youth, are perpetually held out over the flames of hell, rotting and smoldering in the stench of their sin, unless and until God snatches them back—in the nick of time—upon their confession of faith and/or baptism. Such ministers and older believers do not want, in other words, young people to feel themselves to be sinners, tip to toe and all the way through. Instead, they want them to feel themselves beloved by God. For they are. They are God’s creatures, made in his image, for whom Christ died.

But there’s the catch. Why would Christ die for creatures about whom all we can say is, they are beloved of God, and not also, they have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory? The more sin drops out of the grammar of Christian life, the more the cross of Jesus becomes unintelligible. So much so that children and teenagers can’t articulate, even in basic terms, why Jesus came to earth, died, and rose again.

There is much to say about this phenomenon. As ever, the church’s leaders are fighting the last generation’s war. The result is extreme over-correction and, however unintended, the mirror-image mis-formation of the young. Instead of believing they’re worth nothing, being filthy sinners whom God can’t stand the sight of, they now believe they’re worth everything, and therefore utterly worthy—sin being a word they’d barely recognize, much less use to describe themselves. Moreover, this is where therapy enters in. Self-image and self-esteem and mental health having taken over load-bearing duty in Christian grammar, replacing concepts like sin and righteousness, holiness and justification, atonement and deliverance, the Christian life comes to be understood as the achievement of a certain well-adjusted standing in the world. The aim is to find emotional, physical, financial, relational, vocational, and spiritual balance. The aim, in a word, is health. And it is utterly this-worldly.

Note, in addition, the burden this places on the believer. When sin-talk is operative, it does a great deal of work in making sense of one’s unhappiness, one’s sense of there being something wrong, not just with the world but with oneself. Whereas when the message is simultaneously that (a) God affirms me just as I am, so that (b) I don’t need God to move me from where I am to where I’m not, then (c) the upshot is a sort of therapeutic Pelagianism. Or, as Christian Smith has popularized the term, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). God is there to observe and to affirm, but neither to judge nor to save. And this is a burden, rather than a relief, because all of a sudden I seem to, need to, matter a lot. Yet one look in the mirror shows me that I don’t matter at all. I’m a blip on the radar of cosmic time. I’m nothing. So I keep upping the ante of just how much God loves and values me, even though I and everyone else I know sense that something is amiss. But saying “something is amiss” sure smells like shame, guilt, and sin … so I turn back to the latest self-help Instagram influencer to help me see just how worthy and valued I am.

In sum, a therapeutic gospel that has excised sin from the Christian social imaginary not only reduces God to a bit of inert furniture in a lifelong counseling session. It’s also bad for mental health. This shouldn’t surprise us. If original sin is true—if you and I and every human being on earth is conceived and born in bondage to Sin, Death, and the Devil, so that we cannot help but sin in all we say, do, and think and thus desperately need deliverance from this congenital moral and spiritual slavery—then pretending as if it were not true could never be conducive to a life well lived. The concept of mental health, as with any form of health, presupposes the concept of truth and therefore of a truthful, as opposed to false, understanding of ourselves and our condition. Sin is part of this condition. We cannot understand ourselves without it. Cutting it out, we lose the ability not just to understand ourselves, but to help or be helped, in any way, by anyone. Denial of sin is, in this way, a form of willful self-deception. And self-deception is the first thing we need to be freed from if we would pursue either mental or spiritual health, much less both.

If, then, preaching is the first (though not the only) place where the grammar of Christian life and faith is fashioned and forged for ordinary believers, then how should the foregoing inform preaching today? Put differently, how should preachers go about preaching the good news of Christ instead of a therapeutic gospel? What are a few simple marks of faithful proclamation in this area?

I can think of four, plus an extra for good measure.

First, preach God. This is a no-brainer, but then, you’d be surprised. As I’ve written elsewhere, God should be the subject of every sermon, and ideally the grammatical subject of most of any sermon’s sentences. God is the object and aim, the audience and end of every sermon. A sermon is not advice about life. It is not commentary on current events. It is the announcement of what God has done in Jesus Christ for his beloved bride, the church, and in and through her, for the world. The rule for every sermon is simple: God, God, and more God. The living God, the triune God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No one should ever walk away from a sermon wondering where God was, or supposing that the onus lies on me rather than God.

Second, preach salvation. Likewise, this one surely seems a strange suggestion. I might as well recommend using words when preaching. But the therapeutic temptation is strong; MTD has no soteriology, because it lacks both a savior and a condition to be saved from. So the god proclaimed ends up being an inert deity, a lifeless idol, a bystander who at most serves as cheerleader from the sidelines. He’s not in the game, though. He doesn’t act in your life or mine. He isn’t up to anything in the world. He certainly hasn’t already done the marvelous work of redemption. But this is a flat denial of the gospel. Preaching ought therefore to be about salvation from beginning to end. Both the act and the effect of salvation. God, the saving God, the delivering God, the rescuing God: He has done it! It is finished! You are saved! You, right there, in the pews, worried about debt and anxious about your kids, you have been saved by God, are saved, even now. Rejoice!

Third, preach (about) sin. To be saved, as we’ve already seen, entails something to be saved from. Preaching that fails to mention sin thereby fails to proclaim the gospel of salvation and, ultimately, fails to proclaim the God of the gospel. Sin—though not only sin—is what we are saved from. Not his sin or her sin, but yours and mine. I am a sinner. Like David, I was a sinner from my mother’s womb. I was born into quicksand, and the harder I struggle the deeper I sink. God alone can help me. No one else. What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

This is the promeity of proclamation. It is pro me only so long as I’m personally in the condition that needs resolving, and no one but God can do the resolving. I need to know it, to feel it in my bones. Not to see myself as a disgusting wretch whom God can’t bear to look at. God loves me. I’m the prodigal. But like the prodigal, I’m a thousand miles away, lying in the mud, eating pig slop. Sin has reduced me to porcine living. I yearn for the Father’s house. The Father yearns for me to be in his house. But I need to be lifted up, to be rinsed and washed and cleaned of the sin that clings so closely. I need to be freed of these chains, chains that I all too often prefer to freedom. God is ready to liberate. He is the great emancipator. He is standing at the door, even now, knocking. But if preaching never shows me my bondage, how can I ever ask God to unshackle me, much less accept his offer to do so? Preaching, rightly understood, is nothing other than the weekly heralding of this very offer: the offer of freedom to sinners.

Fourth, preach heaven. It is in vogue these days to avoid talk of heaven. Again, I’ve written about this elsewhere, but the reasons have to do with class, education, and baggage. The baggage is an upbringing that made the gospel exclusively about the next life, with nothing to say about this one. One’s postmortem destination exhausted the church’s message. As for education, it concerns an influential turn in evangelical scholarship the last two generations, represented symbolically by N. T. Wright. This turn uses the already/not-yet eschatology of the New Testament, wedded to a certain understanding of the new creation, to subvert colloquial talk of “this world/earth” and “the next world/heaven.” Instead of this schema, because heaven is breaking into earth, because God is going to renew all creation rather than burn the earth to ashes, it follows that we should care about this world and not only the next. Practically, this means focusing on social issues like poverty and homelessness as well as matters of culture, like the arts, film, TV, and so on. On the ground, the effect can be a kind of embarrassment about old-school evangelism. After all, isn’t that passé? Haven’t we learned that the gospel isn’t about leaving this world for the next, abandoning earth for heaven?

Well, no, we haven’t. For ordinary believers, “heaven” may be mixed up with imperfect eschatology—they may imagine it as disembodied and distant rather than redeemed and resurrected, God dwelling with us forever in the new heavens and new earth—but what it mainly signifies is the next life, beyond death, with God, minus sin, death, suffering, and evil. And that is as right as right gets. There’s nothing to correct there. Further, ordinary believers are right in their instinct that if this is what “heaven” means, then heaven is a big deal, even the main thing. Eternal life with God, beyond this vale of tears, is what the gospel brings to us. It is the good news. Yes, we have a share of it in this life: a glimpse, a foretaste. But it’s nothing in comparison to the real article. This is why the Christian life is defined by hope. Yet if the church does not give her members anything to hope for, truly to spend a lifetime yearning for with a deep hungry ache, then she has failed in her task. Preaching, accordingly, should proclaim this hope: with gladness and without apology. Just as preaching should form listeners over time to understand themselves as sinners saved by almighty God, it should also form them to understand themselves as pilgrims journeying from earth to heaven, from the city of man to the city of God, from this life of injustice, idolatry, sin, suffering, illness, and death, to eternal life free of every such enemy, all of which God himself has put away and destroyed, forever. Such is hope worth living for. Such is hope worth dying for.

Finally, preach (about) Satan. One test for preaching that seeks to avoid reducing the gospel to therapy is whether it mentions the Devil, demons, and evil spiritual forces. Show me a church that talks about Satan, and I’ll wager it also talks about sin, salvation, heaven, and God. Show me a church that never talks about Satan, and I’ll wager that next Sunday’s sermon won’t mention sin or heaven. Such a church is on its way to disenchantment, secularism, a therapeutic gospel, and functional atheism. The point isn’t that talk of devils is spooky, though it is. It’s that talk of devils presupposes and projects a universe with stakes. I didn’t mention hell above, but the popular imagination pairs heaven with hell. If there’s a good destination, then there’s also a bad one. Matthew 25 suggests as much. And if there’s good at work in the world—his name is God—but also Sin to be rescued from, then there must be some kind of agency that does Sin’s bidding—his name is Satan. Heaven and hell, God and Satan, angels and demons: this is the language of spiritual warfare, of cosmic stakes that hold all our lives in the balance. For ordinary believers, this cashes out in how they understand their daily lives. Are they living in enemy territory? Are they constantly under assault by the Enemy? You don’t have to be charismatic to think or talk like this. But preaching makes evident whether this is the right way to experience the world.

Here’s the fundamental question: Is following Christ like living in wartime or in peacetime? The flavor of a sermon tells you all you need to know. And if, as I began this post, therapeutic preaching finally serves to reassure disenchanted professionals in the upper-middle-class that God affirms them as they are—that a well-adjusted life is attainable, though ennui on the path is to be expected—then we have our answer: there are no demons; there is no war on; we are living in peacetime.

Such a message may be the best possible way to lull believers to sleep. Not literal sleep (a TED Talk can be entertaining), but spiritual sleep. Jesus commands us to be alert, to be watchful, to stay awake as we eagerly await his coming. The command, in short, presumes a wartime mentality. Peacetime is thus a myth, a lie from the Enemy. Each of us forgets this at our own peril, but preachers most of all.

Well-adjusted

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960):

Medicine labors to restore “natural” structure or “normal” function. But greed, egoism, self-deception, and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? “Natural,” if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be “well adjusted” to your world if it says “you have a devil” and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.

Stanley Hauerwas, “Being with the Wounded: Pastoral Care Within the Life of the Church” (2019):

I have little sympathy for clergy who think their ministry of pastoral care to be the expression of a more general stance identified as a helping profession. Admittedly those who so understand their ministry may often manifest pious pretensions necessary to justify their self-proclaimed identity as someone who responds to a crisis “pastorally,” but I do not think such piety is sufficient to justify describing what they do as a church practice.

There is the problem, moreover, when the ministry becomes just another helping profession, and those who occupy that office discover they have no protection from those they are supposed to help. People think they can ask those who identify as “helpers” to do anything because those committed to be a “helper” do not work for a living. As a result, it does not take long before those in the ministry who identify as “helpers” soon discover they feel like they have been nibbled to death by ducks. A little bite here and a little bite there, and before they know it they have lost an arm. Hence, those that started out wanting to be “of help” often end up violently disliking those they are allegedly helping.

Insofar as the ministry is understood as a helping profession, it is difficult to avoid an alienation between those who help and those that need help. One of the great gifts of being in the ministry is the permission it gives to be present to people in crisis when they are often at their most vulnerable point in their life. They are often appreciative that you are present during the crisis, but after the crisis is over they prefer that you be kept at a distance. They excommunicate those who have been present during the crisis because they fear those that have seen them when they were so vulnerable. That they do so makes the up building of the community difficult, to say the least. . . .

I think we get some idea of the character of contemporary understandings of pastoral care by attending to the account that Alasdair MacIntyre provides in After Virtue of the main characters that have authority in modernity ― that is, the rich aesthete, the manager and the therapist. Each, in their own way, is an expression of a culture of emotivism which is based on the presumption that, insofar as our lives makes sense, they do so only by the imposition of our arbitrary wilfulness. Such wilfulness is required because it is assumed that our lives have no end other than what we can create and impose by the sheer force of our arbitrary desires. As a consequence, it becomes impossible to avoid the reality that all our interactions are manipulative.

In such a context, the task of the therapist, as MacIntyre puts it, is to “transform neurotic symptoms into directed energy, maladjusted individuals into well-adjusted ones.” The therapist must do so, moreover, assuming that there is no normative framework other than respect for their clients' autonomy that can shape their interactions.

To be a moral agent in such a culture entails that we can never be fully present in our actions because if we are to be free we must always be able to stand back from our actions, as if someone other than ourselves did what was done. Such a perspective is the only way to avoid being determined by particularistic narratives that would constrain our choices. The therapist cannot avoid reflecting these conditions because the therapist cannot assume a narrative that can help us make sense of the moral incoherence of our lives. Thus MacIntyre's claim, in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, that any challenge to these modern habits of thought faces the difficulty of only being able to think about our lives in terms that exclude those concepts needed for any radical critique.

What MacIntyre helps us see is how the eclectic character of the various psychological theories that so often inform pastoral care reflects liberal political theory and practice. That many people in advanced industrial societies suffer from a sense that they are alone because no one — including themselves — understand who they are is expected result of living in a time when freedom is assumed to be found in having a unimpeded choice. . . .

The account of the development of pastoral care I have just given does not do justice to the complexity of much of the work done under the headings of “pastoral care” and “pastoral theology.” I am not apologizing because I think, as Stephen Pattison has argued, that the pastoral care movement, particularly in America, has ignored the theological tradition that makes the care given through the church Christian. It is not at all clear that Christians are called to be mature or well-adjusted, but it is surely the case that the care Christians give one another ― and particularly the care that is thought to be the province of those that occupy the pastoral office ― will and should depend on being an expression of the fundamental convictions that make Christians Christian.

A therapeutic church is an atheist church

Two friends of mine, Richard Beck and Jake Meador, have been beating similar drums lately, and it occurred to me today that their drums are in sync.

For some time, Richard has been writing about churches that function as though God does not exist. These churches advocate for forms of life, perspectives on the world, and political activism that often are, and certainly may be, good, but which do not in any way require God. God is an optional extra to the main thing. Needless to say, the children of these churches correctly imbibe the message, and eventually leave behind both church and God. After all, if you can have what the church is selling without either faith in God or, more important, the demands God places on your life, then it is only prudent to keep the baby but throw out the bathwater.

There’s much more to say than this, and Richard is very eloquent on the subject. Summarizing the point: The only reason to be a Christian is if (a) the God of Israel has raised Jesus the Messiah from the dead and (b) this event somehow does for you and for me what we could never do for ourselves, while being the singular answer to our most desperate needs. The only reason to be a Christian, in other words, is the gospel. And if the gospel is rendered redundant by a congregation’s life, worship, and teaching, then said congregation has put itself out of business, whether or not it knows it, whether or not it ever intended to do so. It has become, for all intents and purposes, an atheist church.

As for Jake, he has been writing recently about the therapeutic turn in the American church. A church has become therapeutic if the gospel is reduced, and reducible, to the premises and vocabulary, concepts and recommendations of therapy. A therapeutic church does not speak of sin, judgment, guilt, shame, wrath, hell, repentance, punishment, suffering, crucifixion, deliverance, salvation, Satan, demons, exorcism, and so forth. It takes most or all of these to be in need of translation or elimination: the latter, because they are outmoded or harmful to mental health; the former, because they are applicable to contemporary life but only in psychological, not spiritual, terms. A therapeutic church speaks instead, therefore, of wellness, health, toxicity, self-care, harm, safety, balance, affirmation, holding space, and being well-adjusted.

A church is not therapeutic if it endorses therapy and counseling offered by licensed professional as one among a number of potentially useful tools for people in need; any more than a church in favor of hospitals would be “medicalized” or a church promoting the arts would be “aestheticized.” The question is not whether mental health is real (it is), whether medication is sometimes worth prescribing (it is), or whether therapy can be helpful (it can be). The question is whether mental health is convertible with spiritual health. The question, that is, is whether the work of therapy is synonymous with the work of the gospel; whether the task of the counselor is one and the same as that of the pastor.

Answer: It is not.

This is where Jake’s point intersects with Richard’s. If the gospel is interchangeable with counseling, then people should stop attending church and hire counselors instead. Why not go straight to the source? Why settle for second best? If a minister is merely a so-so therapist with Jesus sprinkled on top, then parishioners can sleep in on Sundays, drop Jesus, and get professional therapy as they please, whenever they wish. I promise you, if what you’re after is twenty-first century quality therapy, neither Holy Scripture nor the Divine Liturgy is the thing for you.

Hence: a therapeutic church is an atheist church. Not because therapy is anti-gospel. Not because therapeutic churches are consciously atheistic. No, a therapeutic church is atheist because it has lost its raison d’être: it preaches a gospel without God. Which is not only an oxymoron but a wholesale inversion of the good news. The gospel is, as St. Paul puts it, “the good news of God.” And if, as he puts it elsewhere, God has not raised Jesus from the dead, we of all people are most to be pitied.

A therapeutic church has, in this way, lost its nerve. It simply does not believe what it says it believes, what it is supposed to be preaching. It does not believe that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the best possible news on planet earth, meant for every soul under heaven. It does not believe that the problems of people today, as at all times, have their final answer and ultimate fulfillment in the Word made flesh. Or, to the extent that it does believe this, it is scared to say so, because the folks in the pews do not want to hear that. They want to be affirmed in their identities, in their desires, in their blemishes and failures and foibles. They do not want to be judged by God. They do not want to be told they need saving by God. They do not want to learn that their plight is so dire that the God who created the universe had to die for their sins on a cross. They want to be told: I’m okay, you’re okay, we’re all okay—so long as we accept our imperfections and refuse the siren songs of guilt and shame. They want, in a word, to be heard, to be seen, and to be accepted just as they are.

There is a reason people are going to churches looking for that, why churches are increasingly offering it to them. It’s near to the gospel. But the overlap is incomplete. God is not a therapist, and his principal goal in Christ is not to ensure a high degree of mental health in the context of a larger successful venture in upper-middle class professional/family life. God, rather, is in the business of holiness. And as Stanley Hauerwas has observed, vanishingly few of the saints would qualify as “well-adjusted.” The risen Lord without warning struck Paul blind and subsequently informed Ananias, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). Has anyone read a Pauline epistle and thought, Now this is a picture of stable mental health? The flame of holiness knows no bounds; it leaves burns and scars painful to the touch; it scorches the mind no less than the body:

And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:7-10)

I cannot say whether the author of these words was entirely well. But he was an apostle, and then a martyr, and now a saint. To say the same thing another way, his life was and remains unintelligible if the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a fiction. No God, no Paul. The same should be said (should be sayable) of every church and every Christian in the world—at least by aspiration, at least in terms of what they say about themselves, whatever the extent to which they succeed or fail to meet the goal.

The more, however, a congregation becomes therapeutic, in its language, its liturgy, its morals, its common life, the more God recedes from the picture. God becomes secondary, then tertiary, then ornamental, then metaphorical, then finally superfluous. The old-timers keep God on mostly out of muscle memory, but the younger generations know the score. They don’t quit church and stop believing in God because of a lack of catechesis, as if they weren’t listening on Sundays. They were listening all right. The catechesis didn’t fail; it worked, only too well. The twenty- and thirty-somethings were preached right out of the gospel—albeit with the best of intentions and a smile on every minister and usher’s face. They smiled right back, and headed for the exit sign.