It was Jesus himself who insisted that his own students, the church, should get their house in order before daring to speak about the true and good in public. It’s something that’s stayed with me, even haunted me, for years.
When I was with the Centre for Public Christianity, we put out a documentary subtitled ‘How the Church is Better and Worse Than You Ever Imagined.’ It played in cinemas around Australia, and a short version of it was aired on the ABC TV. Atheists kind of liked it. They could see we were trying to promote the good that Christianity had done through history. The undeniable good of hospitals, charity, education for all human rights, and much more. But they could also see it wasn’t a whitewash. We were dead honest about the terrible things the church had done in the name of Christ.
But there were Christians, not many, but a few, who were really disappointed with the project. They didn’t like that we’d featured so many examples of the Church’s failures: treatment of women, treatment of witches, the inquisitions, support of slavery, and so on. Jesus had said his followers would be marked by love, and here we were suggesting the church had frequently been characterised by hate.
The criticism continued when I wrote my book Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History. Some believers felt I was trying to appeal to the sceptical, woke crowd by bad mouthing God’s own people and throwing the church under the bus. I understand the criticism, I just happily take the criticism on the chin. But it feels to me that just as much as Jesus called his students to the way of love, he also called them to admit their own failures, their own moral bankruptcy.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
The expressions ‘poor in spirit’ and ‘those who mourn’ both refer to recognising the lamentable moral condition of humanity, including Jesus’ own disciples. As well known biblical scholar Don Carson says, “poverty of spirit is the personal acknowledgement of spiritual bankruptcy.” It’s remarkable that the richest ethical discourse in Western history, in my view anyway, begins with a call that we admit our spiritual and moral bankruptcy.
Go check that out in Matthew chapter 7.
One thing you can’t do when you have something in your eye, even a tiny particle, is see clearly. And Jesus is speaking here of getting an entire log in the eye. He was fond of rhetorical hyperbole, and this is almost humorous. The point about the log in the eye is that his students were meant to be more conscious of their own wrongdoing, the log, than the wrongdoing of others, the speck.
When critics expose the failings of the church and a Christian concedes it, this isn’t ‘letting the team down’ or ‘airing the church’s dirty laundry’ in public. It’s just doing what Jesus said, worrying more about our wrongdoing than the wrongdoing of others. The same Lord who called his followers to pursue love, peace-making, purity and all the rest of it, also insisted in the same sermon that Christians should be quick to admit personal fault and slow to condemn the fault of others.
There’s a place for exploring the positive contributions of Christianity, the myriad ways Christians put love into practice. But I can’t see how any of that material would make sense to a thoughtful sceptic if Christians aren’t willing first to admit the systemic failures, the log in the eye, of the church itself.
By John Dickson
Christianity's Comeback
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Check out episode 125: “Christianity’s Comeback”
