I'm having a hard time forgiving a lot of my upbringing in the conservative church, especially the part that continually told me that I am a broken sinner, that my mind and heart are totally depraved, and that I can do nothing good on my own. Whenever I remember these things that I was told for so many years, I can't help but think that perhaps these things fueled--or even created--my extremely negative and self-deprecating view I had of myself up until about a year ago.
It's very dangerous to tie the idea of total depravity into faith. I'm not saying that it is necessarily wrong to do so, but one has to be extremely careful with it. For me, I think a reason I subscribed to a self-deprecating view of myself for so long was because I had been told it was an integral part of my faith. I was told you can't truly understand the gospel until you first recognize that you are inherently broken and sinful, and you can do nothing good on your own. Because my faith was so critical to who I was, I perhaps accepted the negative view of myself as something necessary in order for me to call myself a Christian.
To be fair, I can't blame this entirely on my evangelical background. My brain chemistry is (or was) such that I will latch onto negatives and exaggerate them. But I think that that aspect of me combined with what I was being told is what helped keep me in that self-loathing state.
When I came to college, I began to hear slightly different things from the church. Subtle nuances which I had never heard before. At the end of each week of my college fellowship, the benediction was always something like, "Know that I love you, we as a community love you, and most importantly, God loves you." So the meeting ended with a reminder of your value and worth to the speaker, to the community, and to God.
I also heard a new interpretation of the command "Love your neighbor as yourself." I learned that that passage does not mean pour yourself out until you have no more room to care for yourself; rather, it has an underlying assumption that you love yourself. And you are actually inhibited from loving others fully if you don't love yourself.
The truth is that I do have value. God has gifted me with a brilliant mind, able to comprehend portions of his creation and design for the world. He uniquely crafted my individual personality. Obviously, my mind is not totally depraved, and I am not totally broken. And so I believe to say that people are completely broken, have totally depraved minds, and are incapable of doing anything good, is to insult God's creation.
Growing up, I was told that only God is good, and people are evil. But guess who made people? God did. Therefore, people must be at least partially good. Sure, people easily can (and do) become corrupted, but man is made in the image of God. Everyone has some good in them.
Of course, I'm not saying that we should never tell anyone that they are broken or sinful. But I think we need to be careful whose heads we drill that message into. There are some people who may have an arrogance issue and will need to hear that to prevent their self-aggrandizement from blooming too much. But there are others of us who have issues of accepting our inherent worth, and that message may not be a constructive thing for us to hear. This is why we need real relationship to happen--we need to truly and intimately know each other as members of this community called Jesus-followers.
No comments:
Post a Comment