A Time to Laugh

I’m beginning to see a pattern. From Ancient Greece through the Enlightenment to contemporary evangelical authors – the way to create a bestseller is to reinforce rigorous (a.k.a. “virtuous”) living, difficult choices, and carbon-copied lifestyles. Don’t make it look easy or obvious, but describe cultural values as some stylish but inelastic clothing you put on. Clothes make the man, after all, right? Just like the book jackets (a.k.a. “covers”) let you judge the book.

In “Against the Sophists,” a pagan Isocrates asserts:

And yet those who desire to follow the true precepts of this discipline [of rhetoric] may, if they will, be helped more speedily towards honesty of character than towards facility in oratory. And let no one suppose that I claim that just living can be taught; for in a word, I hold that there does not exist an art of any kind which can implant sobriety and justice in depraved natures. Nevertheless, I do think that the study of political discourse can help more than any other thing to stimulate and form such qualities of character.

And another pagan Quintillian, Institutes of Oratory, Book X:

It cannot be doubted that a great portion of art consists in imitation, since, though to invent was first in order of time, and holds the first place in merit, yet it is of advantage to copy what has been invented with success. Indeed the whole conduct of life is based on the desire of doing ourselves that which we approve in others. Thus boys follow the traces of letters in order to acquire skill in writing; thus musicians follow the voice of their teachers, painters look for models to the works of preceding painters, and farmers adopt the system of culture approved by experience.

Agnostic Benjamin Franklin:

All the heretics I have known have been virtuous men.

Mormon Stephen Covey, in “Seven Unique Human Endowments“:

Put First Things First is the endowment of willpower. At the low end of the continuum is the ineffective, flaky life of floating and coasting, avoiding responsibility and taking the easy way out, exercising little initiative or willpower. And at the top end is a highly disciplined life that focuses heavily on the highly important but not necessarily urgent activities of life. It’s a life of leverage and influence.

Evangelical R. Kent Hughes, in The Disciplines of a Godly Man, starts the chapter entitled “Discipline for Godliness”:

I learned that personal discipline is the indispensable key for accomplishing anything in this life. I have since come to understand even more that it is, in fact, the mother and handmaiden of what we call genius. . . . We will never get anywhere in life without discipline, be it in the arts, business, athletics, or academics. This is doubly so in spiritual matters. In other areas we may be able to claim some innate advantage. An athlete may be born with a strong body, a musician with a perfect pitch, or an artist with an eye for perspective. But none of us can claim an innate spiritual advantage. In reality, we are all equally disadvantaged. None of us naturally seeks after God, none is inherently righteous, none instinctively does good (cf. Romans 3:9-18 ). Therefore, as a children of grace, our spiritual discipline is everything–everything! I repeat . . . discipline is everything. (11-13)  

Funny, though. That’s not what the Apostle Paul says. Paul doesn’t say that discipline is the key to spiritual “success.” Becoming Christlike is not like putting on a girdle–squeezing you into looking like a Christian from the outside in. Romans 12:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

I guess Paul didn’t write a mass-marketed bestseller. But still — why are we trying to sound like the world’s bestselling ungrace at all? Looking good isn’t doing good. And still, it’s not what you do, it’s Whose you are.

The world can do almost anything as well as or better than the church. You need not be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry, or heal the sick. There is only one thing that the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace.

Gordon MacDonald