• After the note below, I offer Teddy Roosevelt’s “ Ten Reasons for Going to Church” as an historical artifact, if nothing else.
• My views are changing. I’ve been ruminating on the “ wicked” and the “ wrath of God revealed from heaven against all ungodliness” (Rom 5:18). The ruminations have been urged along by recent reading in Revelation and the reminder that history will culminate in a final act of justice. Hebrews 9: “ it is appointed for man once to die, and after that, the judgment.”
• The judgment casts no doubt on the grace of God. If God’s fundamental attribute were not forgiveness grounded in love, the flood would have killed everyone, Noah included, and some other kind of creature, living some other narrative, would have ensued. But the fact is God enacts the “ rainbow covenant” (Gen 9) “ even though every inclination of [man’s] heart is evil from childhood.” Grace is the premise of the entire history of redemption: Romans 5, “ while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
• Yet, as one theologian says, “ sin has not disappeared, and there are still enemies of the redemptive plan of God,” and so wrath, judgment and hell. It ought to be enough for us to recognize that Paul’s phrase above (“…against all ungodliness”) occurs at the beginning of the main book from which we draw the orthodox doctrine of grace (Romans). We should have no problem believing in both God’s wrath and God’s grace.
• So here is my changing view, distinguishing God’s disposition from my own: God hates both wickedness and the wicked, whom he sees with perfect clarity. I must hate wickedness, beginning with my own, but I hate the wicked themselves in only an eschatological sense, not yet knowing with clarity who they are. If Jesus does not speak of those crucifying him as the enemies of God, I have little certainty that I myself can say with precision who the enemies of God are.
• But here is the mistake I believe I’ve been making: I do not think I have spoken with sufficient force against wickedness, I do not hate it as God hates it. Alexander McClaren wrote, “ Perhaps, it would do modern tenderheartedness no harm to have a little more iron infused into its gentleness, and to lay to heart that the King of Peace must first be King of Righteousness.”
• What would a change in my conduct look like? Paul proclaimed Christ by both “ warning” and “teaching” (Col 1:28). I don’t do much warning, either personally or publicly. Warnings create conflict, which is upsetting and exhausting. Yet in Jesus’ ominous list of who exactly will occupy the lake of fire, “ the cowardly” are first. While I do not doubt that I belong to Jesus, I am struck by how seriously the Lord takes cowardice. That comes as a warning to me.
Teddy Roosevelt’s 10 reasons for going to church (slightly abridged):
1. In the actual world a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid downgrade.
2. Church work and church attendance mean the cultivation of the habit of responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength, which prevents a relaxation of one’s own moral fiber.
3. There are enough holidays for most of us that can quite properly be devoted to pure holiday making. Sundays differ from other holidays, among other ways, in the fact that there are 52 of them every year. On Sunday, go to church.
4. Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator and dedicate oneself to good living in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in one’s own house…. But I also know as a matter of cold fact the average man does not thus worship or thus dedicate himself. If he strays away from church, he does not spend his time in good works or lofty meditation.
5. He may not hear a good sermon at church. But unless he is very unfortunate, he will hear a sermon by a good man who, with his good wife, is engaged all the week long in a series of wearing, humdrum and important tasks for making hard lives a little easier.
6. He will listen to and take part in reading some beautiful passages from the Bible. And if he is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss.
7. He will take part in singing some good hymns.
8. He will come away feeling a little more charitably toward all the world, even toward those excessively foolish young men who regard churchgoing as rather a soft performance.
9. I advocate a man’s joining in church works for the sake of showing his faith by his works.
10. The man who does not in some way, active or not, connect himself with some active, working church misses many opportunities for helping his neighbors.