Balance
By J. Joseph PorterI am becoming more and more convinced that Christianity is a balancing act, that following Christ requires the grace of a dancer as well as the grace of God. Danger, for the Christian, lies on all sides – for he lives behind enemy lines. The Christian must be doctrinally sound, but not dogmatic; wise but not detached; zealous, but not reckless; obedient, but not legalistic; righteous, but not self-righteous. He must love all men and hate all evil, live in the world but be not of the world; he must be a soldier and a peacemaker, a shepherd and a prophet, a meek revolutionary and a submissive rebel.
It is a tall order – indeed, the tallest of all orders, for we are called to perfection. What are we to make of it?
We are all in a war between good and evil. This war is at least as old as Adam, and all men know it firsthand. What all men do not seem to know is that the war began as a war between good and good – between God’s command and man’s desire for wisdom. The root of evil, as St. Augustine observed, was not evil itself, but disordered good; idolatry does not begin with the worship of Satan but with the worship of the secondary: family, country, comfort, romantic love, the Law… Lewis’ example is instructive: It is not a sin to love a dog; it is a sin to love a dog more than one loves one’s fellow man. And a man has not understood himself until he has identified his dog.
Thus, in the history of the Church, we see Arius sacrifice Christ’s divinity for the sake of his humanity; we see Calvin sacrifice free will for the sake of God’s providence; we see the sinfulness of the flesh become the heresy of original sin, and the Bible’s call for justice become liberation theology. We see movements that are too moralistic, and movements that are too worldly; movements that dream of the past, and movements that dream of the future; movements that have forgotten Heaven in their quest to bring it to Earth, and movements that have never given a thought to Earth in their anticipation of Heaven. The centuries are littered with ascetics and materialists, fideists and rationalists, sinners and clumsy men who never learned to balance.
This is not an issue only concerning doctrine and history; it is not even an issue primarily concerning doctrine and history. Every church and every man today and forever walks upon a tightrope: the Lord himself assured us that the way was narrow. Our modern Christianity can be too individualistic – but it can also neglect the centrality of personal faith. We can forget that we have freedom in Christ – and we can also forget that we are slaves to righteousness.
In my own life, I see my healthy skepticism sometime devolve into cynicism. I see my hunger for righteousness become an implicit belief in salvation through righteousness. Maintaining my balance – not squelching one good out of love for another – is a delicate task. In fairness to myself, I am hardly alone in this matter; everyone around me runs similar risks. The introverts think that Jesus was an introvert, and the extraverts (unsurprisingly) disagree. Surely, he was a Republican – unless he was a Democrat. Christians ought to pray more, read more, evangelize more, be stricter, be more tolerant, be bolder, be more open-minded, be more merciful, be holier, be more reverent, be more joyful, and so on. We each overemphasize our pet virtues and pet vices (which generally reflect, respectively, our strengths and weaknesses), neglecting other virtues and vices until we have distorted the faith entirely. Thus do we make our God in our own image, and thus is the Body broken – for if its members cannot balance, it will be torn apart in every direction.
The problem, then, is a failure to balance. What is the solution? I am no prima ballerina, but I do have a few suggestions.
The first is simply to recognize that danger lies in more than one direction – that virtually any good can be taken too far. The second is to maintain always a sober judgment about ourselves (something impossible, by the way, with pride). The Church is a Body, and the foot is useless if it does not understand that it is a foot. In the same way, every Christian must see his idiosyncrasies, biases, and prejudices – see and understand his predispositions, inclinations, and preferences. In doing so, he will inevitably begin to recognize the ways in which he is tempted to trip and fall; that is, he will begin to recognize his spiritual center of gravity.
The corollary is to remember the importance of unity: “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4.3, NIV). Once the foot achieves a sober self-judgment, it cannot help but see that it desperately needs the rest of the Body. The Church is not the Church until She is constituted of the whole motley crew of mankind: the traditionalists and the progressives, the jocks and the geeks, the cautious and the firebrands, the loudmouthed and the shy. A Church composed only of feet is not just weak and unfruitful, but creepy.
My most important suggestion, however, is to meditate upon this one simple fact: We will only ever achieve balance if we fix our eyes upon Jesus – a master of grace in every sense of the word. A King and a Shepherd, a Lord and a Servant, a Lion and a Lamb, he transcends every tired party line, and truly is an everlasting man. If we set our sights on being conservative, we will fall; if we set our sights on being liberal, we will stumble; if we set our sights on being Lutheran, Calvinist, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or Evangelical, we will surely fail. Aiming for evangelism or prayer or Bible study or social justice or peace or sound doctrine is not enough; we must aim for Jesus Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. After all, how can we balance if we do not know where the tightrope is? And how can we know where the tightrope is if we do not follow the only man who ever successfully navigated it?
Yet we are so easily distracted. Lewis writes, “There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.” The same could be said of any other good that has turned men away from the Good. How easily we act in the name of Christianity or of world peace, toleration or tradition, when we should act only in the name of Jesus Christ!
Our Lord’s words have never rung more true: “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14.6; emphasis added). If we truly seek to follow him, we just might be blessed with balance.
Comments (3)
BRAVO JOPS! I needed to hear this so bad!
Also, I love the “creepy”.
This is an excellent post, Joseph, and an important one. I hope it stirs up a good deal of discussion. Since its strengths are evident and sure to be noted, I’ll just mention the one thing that worries me about it–namely, your defining of how balance is acheived, of where it is to be found. Balance, of course, conjures up thoughts of a mediating position between two extremes. The problem–not just for Christians, but in all of life–is finding a stable, trustworthy perspective from which to faithfully and accurately map out all the various points that we need to know about along the spectrum in order to identify what constitutes “balance,” i.e. the various extremes, the center, and everything in between.
Yet how this is to be done is not at all obvious–your closing plea to keep our eyes on Jesus is a salutary reminder, but nonetheless somewhat generic. Is the theological difference between Calvin and Arminius (or Augustine and Wesley, or Luther and Erasmus…) ultimately reducible to one person who kept his eyes in love on the Lord, and the other who didn’t? I doubt it. (well, maybe with Erasmus:) Another way to put it: given both human sin and human finitude, EVEN IF all Christians without exception had been utterly devoted in faith and affection to the Lord, I still think that multiple and diverse (and often contradictory) theological convictions would have been produced throughout church history. This isn’t to deny, of course, that significantly mistaken doctrine can’t be the direct by-product of unbelief and dire preoccupation with self rather than with God–of course it can. But it is to deny that ALL significant theological disagreements can be explained by the various parties relative focus (or lack thereof) on Jesus. I think it is a good deal more complicated than that.
Moreover, it seems that you put forward “fixing our eyes on Jesus” as not only the proper subjective factor in helping us to achieve balance, but also as the objective measuring rod by which the many Charybdis and Scylla’s in the theological realm can be avoided. Yet this naturally begs the questions, “Which Jesus?” “Whose interpretation of him?” I don’t mean to be trite here, by any means, as if to infer that all interpretations or scholarly reconstructions of Jesus are created equal. Far from it.
Yet one thing I have always noticed in dicussions about “balance” is how it inevitably seems to wind up being defined–a spectacular coincidence and nothing more, no doubt!–as consisting of basically OUR own present belief system:) I’m not picking on you here personally, of course, Joseph. If I wrote a post on “balance” today, it would include mention of how Calvin held together the biblical tension between God’s absolute sovereignty and our very real responsibility far better than Pelagius, Erasmus or Arminius ever did, and how Augustine’s take on original sin–while not perfect–nonetheless admirably holds together both our profound human dignity AND the radical evil we have internally possessed ever since journeying East of Eden, and that Pascal and Chesterton were more “balanced” in their following in the well-worn stream of the Augustinian tradition than those who separate themselves from it. Other aspects of my hypothetical treatment, of course, would be quite similar to yours.
My point, then, is that “balance” is not quite so obvious as we might think at first. It looks like one thing to a Democrat, and another to a Republican (and another to the infamous, mythic “centrist”!). The examples could be multiplied into every sector of human life. In fact, what we even MEAN by “liberal” and “conservative” is not at all a fixed, static phenomenon in human civilization, but fluctuates wildly between various cultures and generations and social locations. What seems to a contemporary Western individual to be a “moderate” life seems downright extremist in its moral compromises to a Middle Eastern Muslim–and vice versa. It would seem that not only is the “center” disputed, but the “extreme” points on the spectrum are equally hidden from us and elusive of any widespread agreeement. From whence, then, can we stand in order to gaze upon this longed for “balance”? And what safeguards can be put into place to calm our aroused suspicions that we have, in the end, managed to merely transfer the term “balance” to replace “what at this current moment seems sensible to ME”, and nothing more?
I’m fascinated. I think that balance has to be achieved through multiple people in the body of Christ – like this blog, for example. I once had this wonderful conversation with Anne. It went something like this:
“Here is Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. Have you read it?”
Anne: “No…. The problem with me is I’m such a Lewis snob that I can never find anyone to match up to him.”
Me: “But Tim Keller IS better at speaking to today.”
Anne: “Well, I suppose so.”
Me: “If only CS Lewis were alive today!”
Anne: “WHY did he have to die???”
Me: “Well, that’s why we exist!”
Anne, opening her big blue eyes and looking at me in disbelief: “But NONE of us can be like Lewis!”
Me: “That’s why there are so many of us!”
Anne: “Right…. I guess you can be the Lewis of Till we have faces… and I can be the Lewis of the literary criticism, and Nico and Jops and Jordan can be the CS Lewis of Mere Christianity… and…”
Me:”And with our powers combined…”
Anne:”Like the transformers…”
Me:”We can reincarnate CS Lewis! Well… Only to reincarnate Jesus, though.”