The Problem With Trying

I seriously doubt, despite what so many religions and their followers imply, that the God of merit making people is who they think he is.  In fact, I seriously doubt he is a God any of those people really love.  To love him, they’d have to be convinced that he loves them.  But what are they taught?  They are actually taught that his love is conditional—his favor is contingent on good behavior.  Commonsense alone should tell us that love, which one must earn, is not love. In the last analysis, sin and evil, ironically seem to reduce to the failure to follow a child-like commonsense which accepts that we are sinners whom God has forgiven--unconditionally. Children know that forgiveness from their parents is evidence of great love worthy of reciprocation. 

Of course, there is more to sin and evil than failing to realize this because even when we understand these things, we still struggle with temptation.  And we can wonder all day about why temptations are there to tempt us.  They make some degree of failure inevitable.  In the last analysis, our response to our failure is what matters.  If we don’t care about our moral failures, we’ll hardly be sorry and we’ll simply exacerbate the problem that sin and evil already are.

The problem, in both cases–that of the self-righteous and that of the hedonist, is with a mistaken belief of the need to “try.”  Some people think they have succeeded.  Others think they can’t.  Both resist the notion that they are guilty of sin.  One group thinks they have overcome their sinfulness.  The other thinks they are not responsible for their sins–after all, “I’ve tried and I can’t be good.”  Implicitly, both secretly think any God who still holds them culpable is the one with the hang up about sin.  Neither realize that God is interested in their love–not in some counterfeit version of love as would be the case if people felt they had to try.  The right picture of who and what we are understands that while no one is perfect, everyone can always do better.  And doing better is something we can do if we want to–trying, by contrast, is just a form of neurosis--passive aggressiveness specifically.

In the broad spectrum of people who don’t behave as they know they should, which is everyone, there are those who are not even trying and those who are.  But, what’s more, among the broad spectrum of those who are trying, there are many who have deceived themselves about their success.  And among those who aren’t trying, their “give-up” attitude is actually healthier than their “keep-trying” attitude because their idea of what constitutes “trying” was never quite right to begin with.

By saying people are saved by a sacrifice, which atoned for our sins, by God’s forgiving love, his grace and so on, Luther wasn’t saying we don’t have to fear God or struggle with sin at all. The idea that one may cease to listen to his conscience, he said, was a heresy and antinomianism is the name he coined for that.  So what does struggling with sin amount to?  Isn’t “struggling” another word for “trying” which I just said was a  blasphemous form of passive aggressiveness?  Luther got his theology from the apostle Paul who explained this in chapter 7 of his letter to the Romans.  Paul observed of himself, “I am a wretched man.”  He did not say he was wretched until he became a Christian.  The tense there is clear.  He was still wretched even after having become a Christian because his struggle was with his propensity to try to be good rather than simply “be” good.  This isn’t a game of semantics.  This is the idea that all laws are fulfilled by love. Love transcends the legalism of law abiding.  Behaving as one knows is best despite what a particular law might prescribe in a particular circumstance is what Christian liberty is all about. 

In ethics, something like liberty is sometimes described as that prerogative we have to choose the lesser of two evils.  But lying to a Nazi about the Jewish ethnicity of one’s house guests is not a good example of what is meant by Christian liberty.  Christian liberty is the liberty to confidently love with ever more creative acts of love that no law can prescribe or proscribe.  I’m talking about the liberty to do the unexpected, the liberty to touch the untouchable, the liberty to make someone the butt of your joke if good judgment tells you they can handle that and a little comic levity will get them to lighten up.

But in relation to God, a better example of love is praying because you want to pray rather than because you feel guilty, you’ve promised, you’ve made a resolve to be religious, you think you're paying God back for some kind of deal you think he has agreed to, you figure following religious rituals will pay your debt.  If you pray because you feel guilty about NOT having prayed enough, then you are trying to compensate, you haven’t accepted forgiveness, and you’re frankly a bit arrogant about your ability to compensate.  You’re not good and your attempt to compensate for yourself is itself proof.  What you need is to accept your need for forgiveness and accept that you are forgiven.  What you need to do is be sorry.  Praying, then, because you “want” to pray is the only way that fulfills the law in the right way and in the only way God is interested in seeing us behave.   In this sense, the good theology of the gospels may even be viewed as a recipe for mental health.  “Trying” to please God is neurotic.  If we can’t “want” to do that then we aren’t sufficiently sorry for our sins and may need to be made cognizant of them and this is partly what preaching does.