Idols Closer to Home

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this not your own doing, it is the gift of God -- not because of works, lest anyone should boast. -- Ephesians 2:8-9

Grace is the logic of a loving God. There is nothing we can do to earn it, win it, or deserve it. Grace is simply a gift, not a reward. We can receive it only by faith, not through good works. As familiar as that is to us, we have great difficulty coming to terms with the meaning and reality of grace. We seem to find innumerable ways to deny the grace that is the free gift of God's love to us. Either we abuse it and make grace self-serving, or we dismiss its reality altogether by acting to establish our own righteousness. In twisting God's purposes to suit our own or in striving to justify ourselves through our own efforts, we have, in fact, denied the grace of God. In so doing, we have denied ourselves the ability to simply rest in that grace, to be changed and used by God's love.

Perhaps the greatest denial of grace in our time lies in its abuse. Dietrich Bonhoeffer named it "cheap grace." The grace of God is cheapened and distorted when used to cover over our sin rather than to cleanse it. The language of grace is impoverished and exploited when employed to justify our disobedience and lukewarmness.

True grace convicts of sin, softens the heart, and prompts repentance. Cheap grace overlooks sin, hardens the heart, and breeds complacency. True grace accepts and redeems the sinner. Cheap grace accommodates to and justifies the sin.

As Bonhoeffer reminds us, grace, which comes at such a heavy cost to God, cannot be used cheaply. Grace is not meant to obscure the path of discipleship and obedience. On the contrary, grace opens that path to us. Cheap grace proclaims salvation without repentance. The evangelism of cheap grace has no real power to challenge either our personal status or the political status quo.

But there is another denial of grace among us. It often rears up in reaction to the cheap grace most prevalent in our churches.

The reaction to cheap grace can be so strong, the emphasis on radical discipleship and obedience so firm, that eventually there is little room left for any grace in our lives. The response to cheap grace can wrongly lead us to the loss of grace altogether. Its replacement with new forms of works righteousness is a great danger to those who call themselves radical Christians. This danger is my chief concern here.

Sojourners has written much and often about the abuse and cheapening of grace. In many ways, it is the place where we began. That concern still stands; cheap grace continues to be the greatest affliction of the churches.

Radical Christians, however, face another problem. It is the tendency to seek justification in our lifestyle, our work, our protest, our causes, our movements, our actions, our prophetic identity, and our radical self-image. It becomes an easy temptation to place our security in the things we stand for and in the things we do, instead of in what God has done. It is a temptation to depend on things other than God's grace.

In our reaction against cheap grace, we are always in danger of producing radical alternatives to grace. In our desire to be obedient to the gospel and to prove our faithfulness, we could lose the freedom and the power that come from resting and fully trusting in God's grace as sufficient for our lives and for the world.

In the language of the Ephesians passage, radical Christians have things they tend to "boast of." These are the things that can most easily become idols for us. They are not the idolatries of the established society and the comfortable church. We have identified those and confronted them so often that they have become familiar and easily recognizable. Therefore their power over us has been diminished.

But there are idols closer to home. We are less able to recognize them and can, therefore, more easily fall into their grasp. In very subtle ways, they are the idolatries that have the most power over us.

Idolatry must be identified and unmasked if it is to lose its power. Illusion is, in fact, the source of an idol's power. We place our trust in that which is not trustworthy but appears to be. We are deceived by the image of the idol which replaces that which is worthy of our trust.

Not to fully trust God's grace is to engage in illusion. It is to underestimate the power of sin and death and to overestimate our ability to overcome it. Not to rely on the work of Christ is to rely on our own work to save ourselves and the world. When we don't trust grace, we take ourselves too seriously, while not taking sin seriously enough.

What are those things in which we are tempted to place a false trust, things that threaten to become idols for us, things that can become substitutes for grace?

Our lifestyle can become an idol.

To live simply is a biblical virtue, especially in a society choking on its own consumption and waste. Economic simplicity clears away the material obstacles that block dependence on God. Living with less also helps open our eyes to the suffering of the poor. It enables us to participate more easily in their struggle for justice, instead of in their oppression. The motive for living simply is that we might love both God and the poor more freely.

But it is not a simple lifestyle that justifies us. It is, rather, God's grace that enables us to live more simply. Displaying our style of life as if it were a badge of righteousness contradicts the whole spiritual foundation of economic simplicity. We live simply not out of obligation and guilt but to be less hindered in serving God and the poor. It should not be a duty, but a joy. Our lifestyle must not be used to judge others, but to invite them to share in the freedom and the grace we have found.

It was the worst tendency of the Pharisees to seek justification before God through their scrupulous lifestyle. May we never be like the Pharisee who stood beside the tax collector (read: the wealthy corporation executive) and thanked God that he wasn't such a sinner. Complex legalisms employed in the name of simple living could well rob us of the freedom and joy which are the intended fruits of such a lifestyle.

Our identification with the poor can become an idol.

That the God of the Bible is on the side of the poor and the oppressed is beyond dispute. Christ's presence among the lowly and the afflicted is a doctrine drawn from the very heart of the gospels. But taking up the cause of the poor can have its own pitfalls.

There is a tendency among concerned people to romanticize the poor and their poverty. Poverty is ugly and bitter, and the poor suffer from the same sinful human condition as the rest of us. It is insensitive to represent them, and the brutal circumstances of their lives, as uniquely noble and virtuous. That may serve the fantasies of people experiencing downward mobility, but it will not serve the needs of poor people.

The suffering of the exploited is too easily exploitable. The misery of the poor advertises well to serve the personal, ideological, religious, and financial interests of others, and new forms of colonial exploitation replace old ones. The poor become the objects of public rhetoric, the targets of charity projects, and the pawns of political ambition. To use the poor for the sake of Christian ministry or leftist ideology is to again make capital out of their suffering. We have seen too much of religious and political radicals building their personal careers on the oppression of the poor.

Poor people are best served by those who desire to be their friends. We identify with the poor, not to save ourselves, but so that we might better identify with Christ. He is already among the suffering and forgotten ones and invites us to join him there. He has taught us to love and serve him by sharing his special passion for those who are loved the least.

Our actions of protest can become an idol.

The scriptures tell us that love and truth show themselves in action and not merely in words. Direct action in the public arena has become a central means for bearing faithful witness, for making peace, and for seeking social justice. Those actions bring to light what is dangerous and wrong and point to a better way.

However, there is an inherent danger in public protest. Critical tests of any public action or campaign are: What or whom is being made known and visible? Is the truth being made more clear? Or is a person, a group, an institution, or a movement being made more prominent?

All our public actions must be rooted in the power of love and truth. We act for the purpose of making that power known, not for the purpose of making ourselves known. Our motivation must be to open people's eyes to the truth, not to show ourselves as right and them as wrong.

Whenever our protest becomes an effort to "prove ourselves," we are in serious danger. Our best actions are those which admit our complicity in the evil we protest and are marked by a spirit of genuine repentance and humility. Our worst actions are those which seek to demonstrate our own righteousness, our purity, our freedom from complicity. When our pride overtakes our protest, we may simply be repeating, in political form, the self-righteous judgment of the fundamentalists -- "I'm saved, and you're not."

One veteran radical Christian recently wrote, "I have seen so much of the 'heresy of good works' in the religious Left, a belief that is based on the arrogance that we have to save the world, and a very real denial (if not in words, then in actions) that the world has already been saved. And believe me, it is very tiresome to go around feeling like the fate of the world rests on your words and on your deeds ... Sometimes I think that numbers of arrests have replaced indulgences in the 'new church,' and that is not spiritual progress."

Our actions do not have the power to save us. Instead, they can have the power to make the truth known. Although the actions we undertake will never substitute for grace, they can indeed be witnesses of God's grace. Since they lack the capacity to justify us, a better purpose for our actions would be communication.

Because communication is so basic to public action, the nature of what we say and do becomes very important. Actions which mostly communicate a threatening and desperate spirit should be carefully questioned. Free and open evaluation of all public action is necessary to protect the health and character of our protest. The quality and integrity of what we communicate will be its most crucial element.

Action done in public will always carry with it the great danger of presumption. We ought to act with the awareness of how risky it is to claim to be making the truth known. The ever-present threat is to identify the truth with ourselves, instead of the other way around. Because of the inherent presumption of public protest, it should always reflect a spirit of confession, humility, and invitation.

Judgment, arrogance, and exclusiveness are signs of spiritual immaturity. Protest characterized by such things will have the effect of hardening hearts, confirming people's fears, and convincing them of their present opinions. Public action has sometimes done more harm than good. It can drive people away from the very things we are trying to say. It can perpetuate, as well as dispel, public blindness.

Our principle of nonviolence can become an idol.

Never has the absolute need for nonviolence been greater than in a world living under the nuclear shadow. But even our position on nonviolence can be self-serving and hide deeper motives. Nonviolence aims for truth and not for power. Its chief weapon is the application of spiritual force, not the use of coercion. A very serious problem in nonviolent movements is the hidden aggression, the manipulation, the assertive ego, and the desire for provocation that can lurk beneath the surface of repetitive platitudes about the commitment to nonviolence. The rhetorical cloak of nonviolence can be used to hide the will to power which is the very foundation of violence. The desire to win over others, to defeat one's enemies, and to humiliate the opposition are all characteristics of violence and are too painfully evident in much of what is called nonviolent action.

The infighting, media grabbing, and intense competition of the radical movement is hardly an evidence that the will to power has been overcome. Some of the worst tyrannies have been hidden behind anarchist principles and the myth of leaderless groups and communities.

We should know by now that all violence is of a piece. If that is true, then the violence of dissent is directly linked to the violence of the established order. It is, in fact, a mirror reflection of it. Therefore, the violence present in the peace movement can be said to be part of the violence that fuels the nuclear arms race. We can no longer justify the peace movement by appealing to the greater violence of the system. The urgency of the nuclear situation calls for more, not less, care in the actions we undertake.

Nonviolence does not try to overcome the adversary by defeating him, but by convincing him. It turns an adversary into a friend, not by winning over her, but by winning her over. Knowing that today's enemy may become tomorrow's friend should cause us to examine our treatment of opponents more closely. It is interesting how military and business leaders who "defect" to the peace movement are transformed from demons into saints overnight.

Patience is central to nonviolence. Nonviolence is based on the kind of love the Bible speaks of as "enduring all things." Thomas Merton taught us that the root of war is fear. If that is true, we must become much more understanding of the fears people have. The most effective peacemakers are those who have experienced the healing of their own fears and can now help lead others out of theirs. There is still too much fear in the peace movement to heal the fears of a nation. How can we be peacemakers when we are still afraid of one another? Our hope is in the deepening of our experience of the "perfect love that casts out fear."

Our prophetic identity can become an idol.

The prophetic vocation is deeply biblical and highly dangerous. It is a calling most necessary for our time, but one which requires the most intense scrutiny. Prophets have always challenged idolatry. The people of God forget who they are and to whom they belong. Before long, their forgetfulness causes them to fall into the false worship of idols. Prophets are then raised up to name the idolatries, to speak the word of the Lord, to lead the people out of their false worship, and to bring them back to God.

The need in our day is for clear words of God's judgment and mercy. The prophetic vocation is to faithfully communicate that judgment and mercy in a way people can hear and understand. A genuinely prophetic message will never show selectivity, partiality, or parochial interest. A prophet in the biblical tradition will not challenge some idols and leave others untouched. He or she will not rage against injustice and violence in some places and be strangely silent about oppression elsewhere.

It is painfully apparent that radical Christians have not always been true to the whole counsel of God's judgment. An ideological selectivity intrudes, a political bias which undermines the credibility and power of prophetic witness. The idolatries of the establishment are attacked while the idols of the anti-establishment receive less critical treatment. The evils of the majority culture are assailed but the sins of the counterculture are often passed over. The political prisoners of right-wing dictatorships seem to generate more interest than those languishing in the jails of leftist regimes.

A long-time Christian pacifist recently wrote to me on this subject:

A child dead from a revolutionary rocket we tend to see quite differently than one dead from an "imperialist" rocket. The revolutionary sponsors are guarded by the sanctuary of holy words that make certain allowances for dead children. The death is a tragedy rather than a crime against humanity. Actually, the other side is finally to blame for it. And so forth.

Someone tortured in Chile, we find, is far more needful of response and protest than someone tortured in the Soviet Union. A priest arrested in Argentina is a more pressing matter than a monk arrested in Vietnam. Indeed, the latter need hardly be noticed. The heavy-handed methods of the shah of Iran are a different kettle of fish than those of the Chinese or the Cubans. For the latter are merely breaking eggs in order to make an omelet, as it has often been put to me.

Political orthodoxy is anathema to prophetic integrity. The maintenance of the party line describes propaganda, not prophecy. Prophecy is, in fact, profoundly anti-ideological.

Karl Barth once wrote these words:

The Christian Church must be guided by the Word of God and by it alone. It must not forget for an instant that all political systems, right and left alike, are the work of men. It must hold itself free to carry out its own mission and to work out a possibly quite new form of obedience or resistance. It must not sell this birthright for any conservative or revolutionary mess of pottage.

Politicized theology is no substitute for prophetic witness. Radical proof-texting is no better than fundamentalist proof-texting. We are keenly aware of the conservative, militarist, patriotic, racist, and sexist distortions of the Bible. Likewise, there can be neither a leftist agenda in reading the scriptures, nor anarchist, nor pacifist, nor communitarian, nor any other bias for that matter. The word of God is intended to judge all our priorities, to overturn all our biases, to correct all our perceptions.

If the prophetic vocation is to bring the judgment of God to bear, then the prophet must be the first to be placed under that judgment. The prophetic calling must be, by definition, an extremely troubling one. It must be as troubling to ourselves as it is to those who bear the brunt of our prophetic pronouncements -- or more so.

Smugness and complacency are the prophet's worst enemies. The hardest words of judgment must always be reserved for our own group. God's word must be allowed to confront the idolatries closest to us before it will destroy those furthest away. Pride, alienation, and bitterness are the worst sources of prophetic zeal and will corrupt and distort our witness.

The biblical prophet loved the people, was a part of the people, and claimed them as his own. Therefore the disobedience and sin of the people hurt the prophet, and his first response to their faithlessness was grief, not indignation. The prophet was the one who spoke the hard words. But he spoke with a broken heart.

The prophets would not conform to the people, but they never lost their relationship to them. Jesus, in the tradition of the prophets, showed just such a capacity to love the people without conforming to their sinful ways. In our desire not to be conformed to the sins of the nation, we could lose the capacity to identify with the people which is so basic to the prophetic calling.

Those who would avow a prophetic vocation to the church must ask themselves a question: Do you love the church? Or do you hate it? God will not entrust us with a prophetic ministry merely to cloak our own rage and judgment. But if we love the church, if we love the people, if our hearts ache when we see their folly, then God may trust us to be vehicles of divine rage and judgment, to express God's purposes for the people.

The most basic question for the prophet is to whom he or she is accountable. Prophets not accountable to anyone but themselves are a dangerous and destructive lot. The worst things in history have been done out of prophetic zeal.

Grace saves the prophetic vocation. The knowledge and experience of grace can ease the seriousness with which we tend to take ourselves. Grace can restore our humility, our sense of humor, and our ability to laugh at ourselves. All are regularly needed by prophets. Only sinners make good prophets.

Our biggest idol is ourselves.

Radical Christians, like all creatures, tend to boast most of all of themselves. To trust in our lifestyle, our commitment to the poor, our actions, our non-violence, or our prophetic identity is, in the end, to trust in ourselves. It is to trust in our work, our principles, our causes, and our self-images.

Idolatry is the worship of anything other than God. And an idol is simply an image. When we worship an idol, we are worshiping an image. How important our images are to us! Our lives can so easily become exercises in image-building.

We reject the prestige society offers only to find prestige through our radical status. We eschew success in the world, then pursue it through "alternative" channels. We snicker at the system's professionals while establishing a career in the movement. We leave worldly fame behind but enjoy the special status this society grants to its radicals and prophets. We rail against the power structure and build a power base of our own.

As the Bible says, "There is none righteous, no, not one." Grace can overcome the greatest temptation of radical Christians: to believe that we are better than those who need convincing and converting. Grace imparts to us the capacity to forgive because we know that we have been forgiven. The marks of grace are gentleness, hope, and faith. The most dependable sign of its presence is joy.

To trust grace is to know that the world has already been saved by Jesus Christ. It is to know that we cannot save the world any more than we can save ourselves. All our work is done only in response to Christ's work. To receive the gift of grace is to let go of self-sufficiency and to act out of a spirit of gratitude.

Radical Christians must seek not a successful strategy but a deeper faith. Only then will we have the assurance of salvation, not because of what we have accomplished, but because we have allowed God's grace and mercy to flow through our lives.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.