The Gospel of Me

What this page is asking

The author of this site set down a thesis to be tested, and he put it like this: “Modern Christianity has not necessarily stopped talking about Jesus; rather, it risks turning Jesus into the means by which the individual obtains an experience, identity, purpose, or fulfilled life. Jesus remains in the vocabulary while the self quietly becomes the subject of the religion.” He asked that this be set against the historic church from ancient times.

The thesis is about grammar before it is about anything else. Take two sentences. “Christ died for me.” “I am using my faith to become the person I was meant to be.” Both contain “me” or “I.” Both could be said by a sincere Christian on the same morning. In the first, Christ is the subject and I am the one for whom the thing was done. In the second, I am the subject, the faith is my instrument, and the goal is a version of myself. The thesis says that a great deal of modern preaching, singing and church life has moved from the first kind of sentence to the second while keeping the same vocabulary.

If that is right, it ought to show in particular places: in what a sermon announces, in whom worship is addressed to, in what people mean by a relationship with Jesus, in how they choose a church, in what they call a testimony, in what they think they are called to, and in what they think sin is. The author listed ten such places. This page takes them one at a time.

Two positions, labelled, and used consistently throughout

Both positions are held by people who love Christ and want others to know him. The page states each as a thoughtful person who holds it would state it.

Notice what the two share. Both confess Jesus as Lord and Saviour. Both say that God knows and loves each person by name, that faith must be a person’s own, that Scripture should be applied to life, and that Christ changes those who belong to him. They disagree about one thing: whether Christ is the end to which I am brought, or the means by which I reach an end of my own.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case, from Scripture and from church history, that the Gospel is meant to be personally experienced, applied and felt, and that a faith without those things is the dead formalism the revivals were right to attack. Ask it to include the Psalms, Galatians 2:20, Pietism and John Wesley. Second, narrow it: ask only what John 6:22–71 says, in its setting, about why the crowd came and why most of them left. Third, make it a test: take the text of the last sermon you heard, or the words of the last three songs you sang in church, and ask who is the subject of each sentence. Use no names.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other quotation:
give the work, the edition or translation, the section, and the page
where possible. Where an attribution or date is disputed, say so at
the point of use. Verify every quotation against a reliable published
source; where a quotation cannot be verified, cut it. Do not invent
quotes. Do not take verses out of context: where a text is being
applied beyond what it first addressed, say so.

  TITLE. The Gospel of Me

  AREA OF INTEREST. Gospel of Me.

  THESIS. Modern Christianity has not necessarily stopped talking
  about Jesus; rather, it risks turning Jesus into the means by which
  the individual obtains an experience, identity, purpose, or
  fulfilled life. Jesus remains in the vocabulary while the self
  quietly becomes the subject of the religion. Contrast this approach
  with the historical church since ancient times.

  THE POINTS TO TEST.
   1. From "What has God done?" to "What will God do for me?"
      Historic Christianity centres on God's acts in creation,
      incarnation, cross, resurrection and redemption. Modern
      preaching can shift the centre toward my success, healing,
      purpose, breakthrough or happiness.
   2. Worship: God-directed versus experience-directed. Is worship
      primarily about offering praise, prayer, confession, Word and
      sacrament to God, or about whether I felt moved, enjoyed the
      music, or "got something out of it"?
   3. The sermon as proclamation versus self-improvement. Compare
      preaching centred on Christ crucified and risen with sermons
      that function largely as advice for relationships, careers,
      finances, confidence and achieving one's potential. Often the
      stress is on how the preacher is ahead of everyone else in
      these areas and is doling out advice as a consequence.
   4. "My personal relationship with Jesus." The phrase can express
      something genuinely Christian, but examine whether
      Christianity becomes principally my private relationship and
      experience rather than incorporation into Christ and his
      Church.
   5. Subjective revelation: "God told me." When personal
      impressions become central, the Christian life can subtly
      revolve around what God is supposedly telling me about my
      decisions rather than what God has publicly revealed in Christ
      and Scripture.
   6. Church selection as consumer choice. "Does this church meet my
      needs?" can replace "Is Christ faithfully proclaimed here, are
      the sacraments administered, and can I serve my neighbour
      here?" The worshipper becomes the customer.
   7. Testimony replacing the objective Gospel. Testimony naturally
      emphasises what happened to me. Explore what happens when
      conversion stories, deliverances, miracles and personal
      transformation receive more attention than what happened
      objectively at Calvary.
   8. Calling and "purpose" language. Christian vocation
      historically sanctifies ordinary service to family, neighbour,
      church and society. Modern "discover your God-given purpose"
      language can make Christianity into a search for an
      extraordinary personal destiny.
   9. Sin as obstacle to fulfilment rather than offence against God.
      Sin can be reframed as whatever prevents me from becoming my
      best self. Historic Christianity instead begins with sin as
      rebellion against God, answered by forgiveness and
      reconciliation through Christ.
  10. The revealing linguistic test: count the pronouns. Examine
      sermons, worship songs, testimonies and church advertising.
      How often are the controlling concepts I, me, my dreams, my
      destiny, my breakthrough, my experience, versus Christ, his
      cross, his kingdom, his mercy, his commands? This provides a
      surprisingly concrete way to test the thesis.

TWO LABELLED POSITIONS, used consistently:
  C - Christ the Subject: the Gospel is what God has done in Christ;
      the believer receives it, is joined to Christ and his Church,
      and is turned outward to God and neighbour. Benefits are real
      and follow. HELD.
  M - Me the Subject: Christ is the means by which I obtain an
      experience, an identity, a purpose or a fulfilled life. State
      it as a sincere holder would. UNDER TEST.

COUNTER-CASE. No separate section. Answer objections inside the
argument where they arise, at full strength - including "I came
that they might have life ... more abundantly" (John 10:10), the
first person of the Psalms, "who loved me, and gave himself for me"
(Galatians 2:20), the needy who came to Jesus for healing and were
not turned away, the duty to apply Scripture, the deadness that
Pietism and the revivals reacted against, and "delight thyself also
in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart"
(Psalm 37:4).

ONE PART THE ARGUMENT OWES ITS CRITICS. The "for me" that is truly
Christian: the Psalms, Galatians 2:20, Luther's catechism ("has
redeemed me"), "given and shed for you", the Heidelberg Catechism's
first answer, Wesley at Aldersgate. Say exactly how this differs
from the thing under test, and give the reader a way to tell them
apart.

NAMING. No living preacher, songwriter, church or ministry named,
described or implied. Deceased figures quoted only from dated
published works. Public-domain hymns quoted from their published
texts. Living scholars named only as authors of published research.
Every modern sermon line, chorus, advertisement and testimony is
composed for illustration and labelled as composed.

EXCLUDED. Styles of music. Any judgement on whether those who speak
in the way described are Christians. Assessment of any actual
church. Ground covered by earlier dossiers (prophecy and private
revelation, liturgy, vocation, assurance) is kept brief and linked.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. A sort of the claims inside the
thesis. A sort of Gospel encounters by what the person came for. A
question on the verbs of the Nicene Creed and a sort of
announcements and offers. A sort of remarks made after a service. A
sort of sermon titles and a sort of sermon illustrations by who the
hero is. A sort of New Testament images by whether they address the
one or the many. A sort of guidance by what it is about. A sort of
reasons for choosing a church. A sort of "witness" texts. A quiz on
what the New Testament says Christians are called to. A sort of
definitions of sin. An objection drill the reader answers in his
own words first. A sort of first-person sentences by who the
subject is. A pronoun counter the reader can paste any text into,
with worked samples. A guess-the-source quiz on real, dated
quotations. A diagnostic for the reader's own next Sunday.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating the
key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, and giving the
reader something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-
English quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short
exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. Where a quotation could not be verified against a published source, it was cut. Four things qualified the brief. “Modern” had to be narrowed. The thing itself is in the Gospels and in every century since; Part II gives the evidence. What is modern is that it became a method, with books arguing for it, and Part XIV dates that from 1835 to 1982. The pronoun test needed a correction. Counted by pronouns alone, Psalm 23 and Isaac Watts’s “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” look more self-centred than a church advertisement. The page keeps the count and adds a second step: who does the verbs. Several of the ten things are Christian in themselves. Testimony, application, a sense of calling, prayer for guidance and personal trust are all in Scripture. The page says so at each point and tests their place, not their existence. And the historic church is not the hero by default. Bernard and Thomas à Kempis wrote for monks, Luther was describing the church he had been ordained in, and Edwards was describing his own converts. The older liturgies and creeds keep Christ as the subject by their structure. The people who used them were no less inclined than we are to make the faith about themselves, and they said so.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in Part XVII. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XVI with the sources beside them.

What follows

The thesis, taken apart

A charge of self-centredness is easy to make and nearly impossible to pin down. Everyone agrees that religion should not be selfish, and almost nobody thinks his own is. So the thesis has to be stated in a form that can be checked.

It can be, because it is a claim about sentences. Every sentence a preacher speaks or a congregation sings has a subject, a verb and, usually, someone the action is for. The thesis says three things about those sentences in the modern church.

Each of the four can fail. If the old vocabulary really has gone, the thesis is too mild. If modern sermons turn out to have Christ as their subject after all, it is false. If the experience and fulfilment being offered are simply what the New Testament promises, it is unfair. And if the historic church spoke about itself as much as we do, the contrast collapses.

It should be said at the start that Position M contains a great deal that is simply correct. God does love particular people. He knows the number of the hairs of their heads (Matthew 10:30). Jesus did say that he came so that his sheep “might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). A faith that never touched a person’s Monday would be the faith James calls dead (James 2:17). The Psalms are prayed in the first person. Nobody is asking for any of that to be taken back.

Sort the claims yourself. Each of the eight statements below is contained in the two positions or follows from them. For each, decide whether both positions would accept it, or whether it is the point on which they divide.

0 of 8 sorted

“Because ye did eat of the loaves”

The brief calls this a modern problem. The first thing the sources show is that it is not. The earliest description of it is in the Gospel of John, and it is given by Jesus.

He has fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes. The crowd’s first reaction is to try to “take him by force, to make him a king” (John 6:15). He withdraws. The next day they cross the lake and find him at Capernaum, and he tells them why they have come:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled. Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you.

John 6:26–27. “Meat” in the Authorised Version means food.

Look at what he does and does not say. He fed them, and he does not regret it. He does not say they were wrong to be hungry. He says that they have mistaken what he is for. They saw a sign and took it as a supply. Their answer proves him right: “Lord, evermore give us this bread” (6:34). He replies, “I am the bread of life” (6:35). The gift he has come to give is himself. By the end of the chapter, “many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (6:66). When he asks the twelve whether they will go too, Peter gives the answer of someone who wants the giver: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (6:68).

Mark records the same thing among the twelve themselves. James and John come to Jesus and say, “Master, we would that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall desire.” He asks, “What would ye that I should do for you?” They want the seats on his right and left in his glory (Mark 10:35–37). A few verses later a blind beggar is shouting by the road, and Jesus asks him the same question in almost the same words: “What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?” (10:51). Between the two questions stands the sentence that explains his own coming: “the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (10:45).

The Old Testament had put the question in its sharpest form, and it put it in the mouth of the accuser. “Doth Job fear God for nought?” Satan asks. “Hast not thou made an hedge about him … But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face” (Job 1:9–11). The charge is that Job’s religion is a transaction, and that if the benefits stop the religion will stop with them. The whole book is the test of that charge.

The apostles met it in the churches they founded. Paul, writing from prison, says of his fellow workers: “For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s” (Philippians 2:21). He warns Timothy of people “supposing that gain is godliness” (1 Timothy 6:5). His list of what the last days will look like begins, “men shall be lovers of their own selves,” ends, “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God,” and adds that they will have “a form of godliness” (2 Timothy 3:2–5). And he describes the market that follows: “after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears” (4:3). In Acts, Simon the sorcerer sees the Spirit given by the laying on of hands and says, “Give me also this power” (Acts 8:19).

The church’s word for it: “use”

Augustine gave the thing a vocabulary that lasted a thousand years. Some things, he said, are to be enjoyed and some are to be used. “To enjoy a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake” (On Christian Doctrine I.4, begun in 397). To use a thing is to employ it to get something else. God alone is to be enjoyed. Everything else is to be used on the way to him. Sin turns this round. Writing about Cain’s offering in the City of God, Augustine describes people who bring God gifts in the hope that he will give them what they want:

The good use the world that they may enjoy God: the wicked, on the contrary, that they may enjoy the world would fain use God.

Augustine, The City of God, Book XV, chapter 7 (c. 420). Trans. Marcus Dods, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 2 (1887), as revised for New Advent.

That sentence is the author’s thesis, sixteen centuries early. “Jesus as the means by which the individual obtains” something is what Augustine calls using God.

Bernard of Clairvaux, about 1130, set out four degrees of love. In the first a man loves himself for his own sake. In the second he “begins by faith to seek after God, and to love Him as something necessary to his own welfare. That is the second degree, to love God, not for God’s sake, but selfishly.” In the third “he loves God, not merely as his benefactor but as God” (On Loving God, chapter XV; English text as published by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library). Bernard is not scornful of the second degree. He treats it as where nearly everyone begins: trouble drives a person to God for help, and help received teaches him who God is. His complaint is against stopping there.

Three centuries later a book written for monks, and since then one of the most widely read Christian books after the Bible, described the same thing in words that follow John 6 closely:

Jesus has always many who love His heavenly kingdom, but few who bear His cross. He has many who desire consolation, but few who care for trial. He finds many to share His table, but few to take part in His fasting. … Many follow Him to the breaking of bread, but few to the drinking of the chalice of His passion. … Those, on the contrary, who love Him for His own sake and not for any comfort of their own, bless Him in all trial and anguish of heart as well as in the bliss of consolation.

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book II, chapter 11, “Few Love the Cross of Jesus” (c. 1420). Trans. Aloysius Croft and Harold Bolton (1940), as published by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Luther, lecturing on Romans in 1515–16 while still a friar, took Augustine’s idea and gave it the image by which it is now known. Human nature, he said, is incurvatus in se, bent in upon itself:

Our nature has been so deeply curved in upon itself because of the viciousness of original sin that it not only turns the finest gifts of God in upon itself and enjoys them … indeed, it even uses God himself to achieve these aims.

Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans (1515–16), scholia on Romans 5:4. Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 25 (St Louis: Concordia, 1972), p. 291. He adds that nature does this without knowing it.

Calvin drew the conclusion in a refrain: “We are not our own; therefore, as far as possible, let us forget ourselves and the things that are ours. On the other hand, we are God’s; let us, therefore, live and die to him” (Institutes III.7.1, trans. Henry Beveridge, 1845). And Jonathan Edwards, examining the converts of the Great Awakening in 1746, made it a test of real religion. “The first objective ground of gracious affections,” he wrote, “is the transcendently excellent and amiable nature of divine things, as they are in themselves; and not any conceived relation they bear to self, or self-interest.” True saints “first rejoice in God as glorious and excellent in himself, and then secondarily rejoice in it, that so glorious a God is theirs.” The hypocrite “has his mind pleased and delighted, in the first place, with his own privilege” (A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Part III, the second sign).

Eight people or groups who came to Jesus or his apostles follow. For each, decide what they were looking for.

0 of 8 sorted

What has God done?

When Paul reminds the Corinthians of the Gospel he first preached to them, he says he is repeating what he himself was given, and he says what came first:

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve.

1 Corinthians 15:3–5. Written about AD 55. The wording “delivered … received” is the language of handing on a fixed tradition.

Four verbs, and Christ is the subject of all of them: died, was buried, rose, was seen. The hearers come into the sentence once, in two words: “our sins.” That is how they are involved. He died for them.

The sermons in Acts are built the same way. Here is the centre of the first one, preached by Peter at Pentecost:

Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: Whom God hath raised up … This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. … Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.

Acts 2:22–24, 32, 36.

God approved, God did, God raised, God made. The one thing the hearers are said to have done is to crucify him. Peter tells Cornelius the same story in the same order: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth … who went about doing good … whom they slew and hanged on a tree: Him God raised up the third day” (Acts 10:38–40). And when the risen Christ himself says what is to be preached, it has two parts: “it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations” (Luke 24:46–47).

Not one of these sermons begins with the hearer’s needs, hopes, potential or happiness. They are news. Something has happened, in public, and here is what it means.

The creeds keep the same grammar

The Nicene Creed was agreed by councils of bishops in 325 and 381, and has been said or sung at the Eucharist in East and West for many centuries. The councils wrote “We believe.” The liturgy has each person say “I believe.” After that the believer has almost nothing to do:

… Who for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man, And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: Whose kingdom shall have no end.

The Nicene Creed, as in the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the Order for Holy Communion.

Before you read on, answer one question about that paragraph.

The Creed has room for what a person thinks, feels, decides, experiences and hopes to become, and it uses none of it. This is deliberate. A creed says what is the case whether or not I am having a good week.

J. Gresham Machen, a Presbyterian New Testament scholar writing in 1923 against the liberal Protestantism of his day, put the difference in terms of grammar:

Here is found the most fundamental difference between liberalism and Christianity—liberalism is altogether in the imperative mood, while Christianity begins with a triumphant indicative; liberalism appeals to man’s will, while Christianity announces, first, a gracious act of God.

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), chapter 2; p. 47 in the Eerdmans reprint.

Machen’s target was a liberal theology that kept Jesus as a moral teacher. The author’s target is often warmly conservative. The grammar is the same in both. A sermon made of things for me to do, however biblical its vocabulary, is in the imperative mood.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in 1938 out of the life of the illegal seminary he had led in Germany, said why the order matters:

It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to His Son Jesus Christ, than to seek what God intends for us today. … Our salvation is “external to ourselves.” I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (German 1939), trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), pp. 53–54. From the chapter on reading Scripture together.

But the apostles did promise their hearers something

They did, and it should be stated exactly. When Peter’s hearers ask what they are to do, he answers: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children” (Acts 2:38–39). In the temple he speaks of “times of refreshing” (3:19). The announcement comes with an offer, and the offer is to “you.”

What is offered, though, is the remission of sins and the Holy Ghost. The offer is God. It is reconciliation with him, and his own Spirit. Nothing in any sermon in Acts offers success, promotion, healing on request, a destiny or a better self. And the offer comes second. In Acts 2 it comes in two verses, at the end of a sermon of twenty-three.

Eight sentences follow. Five are from the apostles or the Creed. Three are composed by this page in a familiar modern style and are quoted from no one. Sort each by what kind of sentence it is.

0 of 8 sorted

Whom is worship for?

Two short descriptions of Christian worship survive from the second century. One was written by a Roman governor who had interrogated Christians and wanted the emperor’s advice. The other was written by a Christian for the emperor’s information.

They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god.

Pliny the Younger, Letters X.96, to the Emperor Trajan (c. 112). Melmoth–Bosanquet translation.

And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen.

Justin Martyr, First Apology, chapter 67 (c. 155). Trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885).

A hymn sung to Christ. Scripture read at length. Instruction from what was read. Prayer said standing, together. Thanksgiving over bread and wine. The people’s “Amen.” Neither writer says a word about how the worshippers felt, and Justin is trying to make the best case he can.

The texts that the church went on to use have the same direction. The Te Deum, a Latin hymn of the fourth or fifth century, has twenty-nine verses in the Prayer Book. It opens, “We praise thee, O God: we acknowledge thee to be the Lord,” and for twenty-eight verses the singers praise, acknowledge, believe, worship and ask for mercy, while the Son is the one who “didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb,” “didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers” and has “redeemed” his servants “with thy precious blood.” The first person singular appears once, in the last verse: “O Lord, in thee have I trusted: let me never be confounded.”

The Gloria in excelsis contains what may be the least self-interested sentence in the liturgy: “we give thanks to thee for thy great glory.” The congregation thanks God for being what he is. The Prayer Book preface before the Communion says why: “It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee.” Worship is something owed. The Psalms say so often: “Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name” (96:8); “Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory” (115:1). In the worship of heaven the reason given is God himself: “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things” (Revelation 4:11).

Two directions, and neither is my mood

It would be a mistake to conclude that historic worship is something the worshipper performs for God and gets nothing from. Luther, dedicating the first church built for Lutheran worship in 1544, described two movements:

… that nothing else may ever happen in it except that our dear Lord himself may speak to us through his holy Word and we respond to him through prayer and praise.

Martin Luther, sermon at the dedication of the Castle Church, Torgau, 5 October 1544. Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 51, p. 333.

God speaks, and the church answers. In the historic service the worshipper is given a great deal: Scripture read to him, forgiveness spoken to him, the body and blood of Christ put into his hands with the words “given for thee.” So the answer to “I got nothing out of it” is not that one ought to get nothing. Something was given whether he felt it or not. The question “what did I get out of it?” measures the wrong thing. It looks at the state of the receiver and ignores what was handed to him.

Søren Kierkegaard, in 1847, said that people come to church as they go to a theatre. They think the preacher is the actor and they are the audience, there to judge the performance. He turned it round:

The speaker is the prompter. There are no mere theatergoers present, for each listener will be looking into his own heart. The stage is eternity, and the listener, if he is the true listener (and if he is not, he is at fault) stands before God during the talk. … In the most earnest sense, God is the critical theatergoer, who looks on to see how the lines are spoken and how they are listened to.

Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing (1847), trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper, 1938; revised 1948), chapter 12.

The picture has a limit, and Luther’s sentence supplies it. God is the audience of the church’s praise, and he is also the host who speaks and gives. But Kierkegaard has put his finger on the exact reversal in the author’s second point. In experience-directed worship the congregation is the audience, and the question after the service is whether the performance was any good.

C. S. Lewis made the practical point in a book published the year after his death:

Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. … The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), Letter 1.

Should worship leave me unmoved?

No. “Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing” (Psalm 100:2). Peter speaks of “joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8). And Position M is right about the danger on the other side. Isaiah condemns a people who “draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me” (29:13), and Jesus quotes it against the Pharisees. Words said without the heart are not worship.

But notice what Isaiah’s complaint is. The heart is far from God. The cure for lips without heart is a heart turned towards him. It is not a heart turned towards its own temperature. Joy in the Psalms and in Peter comes from looking at someone, “whom having not seen, ye love.” A service designed to produce the feeling, and judged on whether it did, has the worshipper watching himself. Dossier 20 traces how feeling became the measure, and Dossier 36 looks at what moved to the front of the room when it did.

Eight remarks follow, of the kind made on the way out of church. All are composed by this page. Sort each by what it is about.

0 of 8 sorted

News, or advice?

Paul states what he preached in three sentences to the same church:

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness. … For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. … For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.

1 Corinthians 1:23; 2:2; 2 Corinthians 4:5.

The first two say what a sermon is about. The third says what it is not about, and it names the alternative: the preacher.

Luther wrote a short preface in 1521 to tell ordinary readers what to look for in the four Gospels. A Gospel, he said, “is and should be nothing else than a discourse or story about Christ.” Then he gave a warning about how it is usually misread:

Be sure, moreover, that you do not make Christ into a Moses, as if Christ did nothing more than teach … The chief article and foundation of the gospel is that before you take Christ as an example, you accept and recognize him as a gift … Christ as a gift nourishes your faith and makes you a Christian. But Christ as an example exercises your works.

Martin Luther, A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels (1521). Trans. E. Theodore Bachmann, Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 35 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1960), pp. 117–20.

Luther does not throw the example away. He puts it second. Christ is first someone given to me, and then someone to follow. A sermon that offers him only as a coach, a model of leadership or a source of principles has, in Luther’s phrase, made him into a Moses: a lawgiver with better advice. Machen said the same four hundred years later: “liberalism makes Him an example for faith; Christianity, the object of faith” (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 96).

Is practical preaching wrong, then?

It cannot be. Justin’s account of a second-century sermon, quoted in Part IV, says the president “instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.” Proverbs is advice from beginning to end. James is nearly all instruction. Paul’s letters tell husbands, wives, children, masters and servants what to do, in detail. A preacher who never said anything a person could act on would not be preaching the whole Bible.

What matters is what the instruction stands on. Paul’s letters are built in a regular way. Romans gives eleven chapters on what God has done, and then: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice” (12:1). Ephesians gives three chapters, and then: “I therefore … beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called” (4:1). Colossians: “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above” (3:1). When he tells husbands to love their wives, the measure is “even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). The instruction is there, and it hangs on a “therefore.”

The self-improvement sermon cuts the “therefore.” It gives the instruction as a technique that works: five keys, seven steps, three habits. It could be given by anyone, on any platform, and often the only thing that marks it as Christian is a verse attached to each point. The test is simple. Take Christ’s death and resurrection out of the sermon. If the advice still stands, the sermon was advice.

There is also a difference in what the two things do to the hearer. News can be received by someone who has failed. Advice sorts hearers into those who are managing and those who are not. The person whose marriage has already ended, whose business has already gone, or who is dying, has nothing to do with seven steps. He can still be told that Christ died for his sins and rose.

The preacher as the proof

The author adds an observation of his own: in the self-improvement sermon “often the stress is on how the preacher is ahead of everyone else in these areas and is doling out advice as a consequence.” This follows from the form. Advice needs an authority, and the natural authority for advice on success is someone who has succeeded. So the preacher’s marriage, income, discipline and answered prayers become the evidence, and the congregation is invited to become like him.

Paul’s method was the reverse. He came to Corinth “in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling,” on purpose, “that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:3, 5). When rivals arrived who did advertise themselves, he answered: “If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities” (2 Corinthians 11:30). He called himself the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). John the Baptist gave the rule for every preacher in seven words: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Dossier 35 looks at how ministries talk about themselves.

Eight sermon titles follow, all composed by this page. Sort each by what it leads you to expect.

0 of 8 sorted

Now six sermon illustrations, also composed. In each, decide who the hero of the story is.

0 of 6 sorted

“My personal relationship”

“It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship.” “Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?” These are among the most familiar sentences in modern evangelical Christianity, and the author is careful about them. The phrase, he says, “can express something genuinely Christian.” It can, and that should be said first.

Paul writes of “the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord,” and says his aim is “that I may know him” (Philippians 3:8, 10). Jesus defines eternal life as knowing: “that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). The shepherd “calleth his own sheep by name” (John 10:3). Christianity is trust in a living person, and nobody else can do a man’s trusting for him. If that is what the phrase means, it is saying something the church has always said.

The question is what the New Testament uses where we use that phrase. It has two favourite expressions. The first is “in Christ,” which Paul uses constantly: a person is baptized into Christ, is found in him, lives in him. The second is “one body”:

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body … Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.

1 Corinthians 12:12–13, 27. Compare Romans 12:5: “So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”

A relationship is something two parties have with each other. A body is something a person is part of. In Paul’s picture I am joined to Christ, and by the same act I am joined to everyone else who is joined to him. I do not get the first without the second. “Members in particular” keeps the individual; “one body” says where he is. Gentile converts, Paul says, are “fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19).

The prayer with no “I” in it

When the disciples asked to be taught to pray, they were given a prayer of sixty-six words in the Authorised Version. It contains “our” four times, “us” four times and “we” once. It does not contain “I,” “me” or “my.” Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, pointed this out about the year 252:

Before all things, the Teacher of peace and the Master of unity would not have prayer to be made singly and individually, as for one who prays to pray for himself alone. For we say not “My Father, which art in heaven,” nor “Give me this day my daily bread;” nor does each one ask that only his own debt should be forgiven him … Our prayer is public and common; and when we pray, we pray not for one, but for the whole people, because we the whole people are one.

Cyprian of Carthage, On the Lord’s Prayer (Treatise 4), §8 (c. 252). Trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886).

Jesus also told his disciples to pray in private, with the door shut (Matthew 6:6). The words he gave them to say there are still “Our Father.” A Christian alone in his room is praying as one of a people.

“None other has ever known”

For a clear statement of the other view it is fairest to go to a much-loved hymn, written in 1912 by an American who had trained as a pharmacist and worked for a music publisher. It is out of copyright:

I come to the garden alone, / While the dew is still on the roses; / And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, / The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me, / And He tells me I am His own, / And the joy we share as we tarry there, / None other has ever known.

C. Austin Miles, “In the Garden” (1912), first verse and refrain. Miles said he wrote it after reading John 20, imagining Mary Magdalene at the tomb.

As a picture of Mary on Easter morning it is tender, and a great many people have been comforted by it. As a description of the Christian life, sung by a congregation, three things in it stand out. The singer is alone. The Son of God speaks to him by a voice falling on his ear, and Scripture, sacrament and church are absent. And the joy is exclusive: “None other has ever known.” The New Testament’s account of knowing Christ is that everybody in the body knows the same Lord by the same means. A relationship that no one else has is the opposite of “members one of another.”

This matters for the thesis because of what a private relationship is made of. If the relationship is Christ’s promise in baptism, his word and his supper, then it is as solid as he is, it is shared with every other Christian, and it is there on the days I feel nothing. If the relationship is my inward sense of his company, then its content is my experience, and I am the only authority on it. The subject has moved. Dossier 33 examines the further claim that a mature Christian hears from Jesus in a steady conversational stream.

The Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 shows how the Reformation said “personal” before the word was available. Its first answer is in the first person singular throughout, and its first claim is that the speaker does not belong to himself: “That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.”

Eight New Testament sayings follow. Sort each by whether it speaks to the one or to the many.

0 of 8 sorted

“God told me”

This site has three dossiers on private revelation already: Dossier 03 on modern prophecy, Dossier 30 on the preacher who sets what he has heard above Scripture and reason, and Dossier 33 on the expectation of constant personal messages. This Part is short. It asks only what “God told me” does to the subject of the Christian life.

The New Testament says where God’s speaking is to be found:

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son.

Hebrews 1:1–2.

God’s last and fullest word is a person, and what that person said and did is public. Peter makes a striking comparison. He had been on the mountain at the Transfiguration and had heard the voice from heaven with his own ears: “this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.” His next sentence is: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place” (2 Peter 1:18–19). An apostle who heard God speak aloud sends his readers to the written word as the surer thing.

The Lutheran confessions made this a principle. “God grants His Spirit or grace to no one, except through or with the preceding outward Word,” and “God does not wish to deal with us otherwise than through the spoken Word and the Sacraments” (Smalcald Articles III.viii.3, 10; 1537; Triglot Concordia, 1921). The claim to have the Spirit apart from the Word, the same article says, “inheres in Adam and his children from the beginning.” It is the oldest temptation, and Luther did not think it belonged to one party.

Now look at what the private word is usually about. In the cases people report, God told me which job to take, which house to buy, whom to marry, when to leave a church, what my season is. The content of the revelation is my life and my decisions. The public revelation is about something else entirely. It is about who God is, what he has done in Christ, and what he commands and promises to everyone alike. A Christian life fed mainly on the first kind of word has quietly acquired a new subject. Bonhoeffer’s sentence from Part III applies: it is “more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to His Son Jesus Christ, than to seek what God intends for us today.”

Does God not guide, then?

He does, and Acts records it. “The Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them” (13:2). Paul sees a man of Macedonia in a vision (16:9). Peter is told to go with the messengers of Cornelius (10:19–20). Three things are worth noticing. Every one of these concerns the spread of the Gospel to people who have not heard it. None concerns the private advantage of the person guided. And they are received in company: after Paul’s vision, “immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us” (16:10).

For ordinary decisions the New Testament gives ordinary means. It promises wisdom to those who ask (James 1:5). It tells Christians to make plans with a condition attached: “ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that” (James 4:15). It does not say God is indifferent to a person’s job or house: “casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7). John Wesley, who can hardly be accused of coldness about the Spirit, said that a sober Christian finds the will of God “not by waiting for supernatural dreams; not by expecting God to reveal it in visions; not by looking for any particular impressions or sudden impulses on his mind: no; but by consulting the oracles of God” (Sermon 37, The Nature of Enthusiasm, 1750, §22).

Six reports of guidance follow. Three are from Acts. Three are composed by this page. Sort each by what the guidance is about.

0 of 6 sorted

The customer in the pew

For most of Christian history hardly anyone chose a church. A person belonged to the parish he lived in, and worshipped with whoever else lived there. That is no longer how things are, and it cannot be put back. In most towns there are a dozen congregations within reach and a Christian has to pick one. The author’s sixth point is about what question he asks when he does.

The historic churches answered a prior question first: what makes a gathering a church at all? Their answers agree closely, and none of them mentions the worshipper’s preferences.

Luke’s summary of the first congregation has the same shape: “they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42). A church, on these definitions, is identified by what is given there. The questions that follow from that are the ones in the brief: is Christ faithfully proclaimed here, and are the sacraments administered? The letter to the Hebrews adds a third, and it too points away from the self: “let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together” (10:24–25). The reason given for turning up is the other people.

“Does this church meet my needs?” is a different kind of question. It makes me the fixed point and the church the thing being assessed. C. S. Lewis, in 1942, had a senior devil explain to a junior one why this is useful:

Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. … The search for a “suitable” church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942), Letter 16. “The Enemy,” in the devil’s mouth, is God.

Are my needs irrelevant, then?

They are not, and two things should be granted. First, a person does have needs, and the church exists to meet the deepest of them. He needs to hear the Gospel, to be forgiven, to be fed at the Lord’s table and to have his children taught. Those needs are exactly what the two definitions above describe. The trouble with “does it meet my needs?” lies in which needs are meant. In practice the list is usually music I like, people like me, a convenient time and a sermon I enjoy.

Second, choosing by doctrine is a duty, and this site has argued for it at length. A person who finds that Christ is not preached where he is has every reason to go where he is preached. What matters is the standard he uses. Someone who leaves a church because the Gospel is absent and someone who leaves because the coffee is better elsewhere have both made a choice. Only one of them was shopping.

What a market does to a pulpit

The consumer question has an effect beyond the person who asks it. A congregation of customers has to be kept, and customers are kept by giving them what they came for. Paul describes the mechanism from the buyers’ side: “after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears” (2 Timothy 4:3). The hearers do the heaping. A preacher who depends on people choosing him every week learns what brings them back, and what brings them back is a message about them. Nobody need intend it. The Gospel of Me is what a market in churches selects for, and the pew teaches it to the pulpit as much as the other way about.

Eight questions a person might ask when looking for a church follow, all composed by this page. Sort each by whom it is about.

0 of 8 sorted

Whose story?

“Testimony” and “witness” are the same word in the New Testament, and it is worth seeing what the first witnesses were witnesses of. When the apostles replace Judas, Peter states the qualification:

Wherefore of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, Beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection.

Acts 1:21–22.

A witness is someone who was there and can say what happened to Jesus. That is how the word is used through Acts: “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses” (2:32); “we are witnesses of all things which he did” (10:39). John opens his first letter the same way: “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you” (1 John 1:3). The apostolic testimony is a report of events outside the witness.

Paul is the test case, because he had the most dramatic conversion story in the New Testament and Acts tells it three times. Look at how he uses it. Before King Agrippa he tells the story of the Damascus road, and then says what he has been saying ever since: “witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come: That Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise from the dead” (Acts 26:22–23). His own story explains why he is speaking. Christ’s story is the thing he has to say. When he lists the appearances of the risen Lord in 1 Corinthians 15, he puts himself last and adds, “as of one born out of due time” (15:8).

Personal testimony is in the Bible

It is, and the page should not pretend otherwise. Jesus sends the healed man of Gadara home with a commission: “Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee” (Mark 5:19). The man born blind tells the Pharisees the one thing he knows: “whereas I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25). The psalmist calls people to listen: “Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul” (Psalm 66:16). Revelation says the saints overcame “by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony” (12:11).

Read those four again and look at the verbs. “The Lord hath done.” “He hath done.” In Revelation the blood of the Lamb comes first. Biblical testimony about oneself is still a report of what someone else did, and it sends the hearer to him. The blind man’s story ends with a conclusion about Jesus: “If this man were not of God, he could do nothing” (John 9:33).

What goes wrong when my story stands in for his

Four things follow when testimony takes the place of proclamation, and each of them can be seen in ordinary church life.

Luther thought the whole strength of the Gospel was that it is not about what goes on in us:

And this is the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.

Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), on Galatians 4:6. Trans. Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 26 (St Louis: Concordia, 1963), p. 387.

“Experience” is in his list of things not to depend on. Bonhoeffer says the same in the sentence already quoted: “I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ.” Dossier 23 follows this into the question of assurance, and Dossier 17 into what it does to children who are asked for a story they do not have.

Eight passages follow in which someone bears witness. Sort each by what the witness is about.

0 of 8 sorted

Called to what?

“God has a purpose for your life.” “Discover your destiny.” “You were made for more.” The promise is that somewhere there is a particular, significant thing that I alone was made to do, and that the Christian life is the search for it. Dossier 12 has set out the Reformation’s doctrine of vocation in full. This Part asks what the New Testament itself says a Christian is called to.

The text most often quoted for personal destiny is Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” Its setting is a letter. Jeremiah is writing to Jews who have been deported to Babylon. A rival prophet has just promised that they will be home within two years (28:3–4). Jeremiah tells them the opposite:

Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters … And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it … For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.

Jeremiah 29:5–7, 10. Verse 11 follows directly.

Three things about the famous verse are plain from its setting. “You” is a whole people. The promise is for seventy years’ time, which means that most of those who first heard the letter would die in Babylon. And what they are told to do in the meantime is as ordinary as it could be: build, plant, marry, raise children, and seek the good of the city they live in. The verse is a true promise about God’s faithfulness to his people. It is the reverse of a promise of individual breakthrough. Dossier 41 reads the passage in more detail.

The New Testament’s use of “called”

The word “called” is very common in the letters, and it almost always has the same sense. Christians are called to someone and into a people. They are “the called of Jesus Christ,” “called to be saints” (Romans 1:6–7), called “unto the fellowship of his Son” (1 Corinthians 1:9), called “unto holiness” (1 Thessalonians 4:7), called “in one body” (Colossians 3:15), called “out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9). The calling is to belong to Christ. It is the same for every Christian, and it has already happened.

Where the New Testament speaks of “purpose” in connection with salvation, the purpose is God’s. Christians are “the called according to his purpose,” and the next verse says what that purpose is: “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:28–29). God “hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace” (2 Timothy 1:9).

As for what a Christian is to do with his days, Paul’s instructions are deliberately plain. “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called” (1 Corinthians 7:20). “Study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands” (1 Thessalonians 4:11). “Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Colossians 3:17). The good works a believer is to walk in are ones “which God hath before ordained” (Ephesians 2:10), and for nearly everyone they are close at hand: a spouse, children, parents, an employer, a neighbour. Micah had said it long before: “what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (6:8).

Some people in Scripture are given an extraordinary task, and it is worth seeing how it is announced. When the Lord sends Ananias to the newly converted Saul, he says: “he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake” (Acts 9:15–16). The most remarkable career in the New Testament is announced as a promise of suffering. Peter says the same of every Christian: “For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us” (1 Peter 2:21).

What “destiny” does to ordinary life

The purpose message is attractive because the hunger behind it is real. People want their lives to matter. The historic answer is that they already do, where they are: the mother, the nurse, the man stacking shelves and the woman caring for her father are doing what God has given them to do, and it is holy because he gave it. The modern answer is that mattering lies ahead, in something larger that has yet to be found. That turns the present into a waiting room. It also divides Christians into those who have found their destiny and those who are still looking, and the first group is small, visible and usually on a platform.

Seven New Testament sentences about calling follow, each with a gap. Choose the words that fill it.

What sin is

David committed adultery with Bathsheba and arranged the death of her husband. He had wronged a woman, killed a man and betrayed an army. When he came to confess it, he said this:

Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.

Psalm 51:4. The heading of the psalm ties it to Nathan’s visit after the affair with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12).

He is not denying what he did to Uriah. He is saying what made it sin. Joseph, refusing Potiphar’s wife, reasons the same way. He has just listed everything his master has trusted him with, and he ends: “how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:9). The prodigal son rehearses his confession in the same order: “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee” (Luke 15:18). John gives the definition: “sin is the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4). Paul measures it against God: “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

The Prayer Book’s General Confession, said by English-speaking congregations since 1552, describes sin in a sentence that could serve as a summary of this whole page: “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws.” The first half says what sin is in us. The second says whom it is against.

Anselm of Canterbury, about 1098, wrote a dialogue to explain why God became man. His pupil Boso keeps suggesting that sin could be put right fairly easily. Anselm’s reply has become famous:

You have not as yet estimated the great burden of sin.

Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo, Book I, chapter 21 (c. 1098). Trans. Sidney Norton Deane (Chicago: Open Court, 1903). Boso ends by agreeing that he “ought not to oppose the will of God even to preserve the whole creation.”

The other definition, in its own words

The author’s ninth point is that sin “can be reframed as whatever prevents me from becoming my best self.” This is not a caricature. It was set out in print by one of the best-known American preachers of the twentieth century, a minister of the Reformed Church in America whose weekly broadcast reached millions and who died in 2015. In 1982 he published a book calling for a new Reformation, and in it he wrote:

Sin is any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem. … Classical theology has erred in its insistence that theology be “God-centered,” not “man-centered.” … To be born again means that we must be changed from a negative to a positive self-image—from inferiority to self-esteem, from fear to love, from doubt to trust.

Robert H. Schuller, Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (Waco: Word Books, 1982), pp. 14, 64 and 68.

These sentences deserve credit for candour. Most preaching in this style keeps the old words and changes their content without saying so. This book says so. Sin is defined by its effect on me. Theology is to be centred on man. The new birth is a change in how I see myself. Position M is rarely stated so clearly, and there is no reason to doubt that its author meant it kindly.

Why the definition decides everything after it

What a person thinks sin is determines what he thinks Christ did about it.

On the second line there is nothing for forgiveness to do, because nobody has been offended. Repentance becomes a resolution to do better for my own sake. The cross becomes a source of power for living. And God, having no claim of his own, becomes the one who is on my side against my limitations. Every word of the first line can still be used. “Sin,” “cross,” “saved” and “free” all appear in the second. They mean something else.

Luther’s image from Part II shows what is at stake. If sin is the self curved in on itself, then a religion that tells the self to attend to its own fulfilment is prescribing the disease as the cure.

Does sin not damage the sinner?

It does, and Scripture says so. Wisdom, speaking in Proverbs, says: “he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul” (8:36). “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). The prodigal was starving. A preacher who tells people that sin will ruin them is telling the truth. But look at the order in Proverbs. The sin is “against me,” and the wrong to one’s own soul is the result. The historic account includes the damage. The modern one keeps the damage and drops the offence.

Eight statements about sin follow. Five are from Scripture or the Prayer Book, one is the sentence from 1982 quoted above, and two are composed by this page. Sort each by how it defines sin.

0 of 8 sorted

“Who loved me”

Everything so far could be misread as an argument for a faith with the first person removed: a religion of correct statements about God, held at arm’s length. That would be a different error, and the historic church rejected it as firmly as the other. The devils, James says, believe that there is one God (James 2:19). What they cannot say is “for me.”

Paul can:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Galatians 2:20.

Luther thought this the most important thing in the verse:

Read the words “me” and “for me” with great emphasis. Print this “me” with capital letters in your heart, and do not ever doubt that you belong to the number of those who are meant by this “me.”

Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (1535), on 2:20. Abridged translation by Theodore Graebner (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1949); free at Project Wittenberg.

His catechism for children does what he recommends. Explaining the second article of the Creed, it turns “our Lord” into the first person singular: Jesus Christ “is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil … in order that I may be His own” (Small Catechism, 1529; Triglot Concordia, 1921). At the Lord’s Supper the catechism fastens on the words “Given, and shed for you.” The Prayer Book has the minister say it to each communicant one at a time: “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee.” The Heidelberg Catechism’s first answer is in the first person from beginning to end. John Wesley’s account of the evening of 24 May 1738 turns on two words: “an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine.”

So the historic faith is thick with “I,” “me” and “my.” If the thesis were that Christians should stop saying “me,” it would be refuted by the Bible, the catechisms and the liturgy together.

The difference, exactly

Put Paul’s sentence beside a composed modern one. “The Son of God … loved me, and gave himself for me.” “I am stepping into everything God has for me.” Both have “me” in them. In the first, the Son of God is the subject of both verbs, and what he gives is himself. In the second, I am the subject, the verb is mine, and what I am after is “everything God has,” which is a way of naming his gifts without him.

Look also at what the first person is doing in each of the historic texts. In Galatians it has been crucified: “not I, but Christ.” In the Small Catechism it is “a lost and condemned creature.” In the Heidelberg Catechism it is “not my own.” In Wesley’s journal it has sins. In every case the “I” is the one in need, and Christ is the one who acts. The historic “for me” makes me the recipient. The Gospel of Me makes me the agent, and Christ the supplier.

Three questions that tell them apart

Who does the verbs? This is the grammar test, and Part XIII turns it into something you can run on any text.

For whose sake? In Augustine’s terms, is God being enjoyed or used? The Psalm most often quoted for getting what one wants says, “Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart” (37:4). The person who delights in the LORD finds that what he desires has changed. Another psalm says what it changes to: “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee” (73:25). Jesus puts the same order into one sentence: “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33).

What is left if the benefit is withheld? This is Job’s test, and Scripture gives three answers to it that have never been bettered. Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, facing the furnace: “our God whom we serve is able to deliver us … But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods” (Daniel 3:17–18). Habakkuk: “Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines … Yet I will rejoice in the LORD” (3:17–18). Job himself: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (13:15). A faith that can say “but if not” has God as its object. A faith that cannot was aimed at the deliverance.

Is fulfilment a bad thing to want?

No. Augustine opened his Confessions with the sentence that answers this: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (I.1; trans. J. G. Pilkington, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 1, 1887, as revised for New Advent). The heart is made for something, and it is restless until it has it. Position M is right that human beings are meant to be fulfilled. Augustine’s point is about where. The heart rests in God. It does not rest in what God can be used to obtain.

C. S. Lewis, asked in 1944 which religion gives its followers the greatest happiness, replied: “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity” (“Answers to Questions on Christianity,” in God in the Dock, 1970). And he ended his best-known book with the paradox the Gospels state in Mark 8:35:

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), the closing lines.

Eight sentences follow. Every one is in the first person and every one contains “me” or “my.” Four are from Scripture, a catechism or a hymn; four are composed by this page. Sort each by who the subject is.

0 of 8 sorted

Count the pronouns

The author’s last point is a method. Take a sermon, a song, a testimony or a church’s advertising and count. How often are the controlling words “I,” “me,” “my dreams,” “my destiny,” “my breakthrough”? How often are they “Christ,” “his cross,” “his kingdom,” “his mercy”? He calls this “a surprisingly concrete way to test the thesis,” and it is. The tool below does the counting for you.

Ten texts, counted

The table below runs the same count on the ten samples. Five are historic texts, one is a gospel song of 1912, and four are composed by this page in recognisable styles. The last column is the part a machine cannot do: a reading of who performs the verbs.

What the count shows, and where it fails

At the extremes it works at once. The Lord’s Prayer has no “I” words at all. The Nicene Creed has five, all of them in the phrases “I believe,” “I acknowledge” and “I look for,” against twenty-two names of God. The composed advertisement has eight “you” words and no name of God in it. The composed chorus has fourteen “I” words in forty-seven. Nobody needs a theologian to see the difference between those.

In the middle it fails, and it fails in an instructive way. Psalm 23 has seventeen “I” words in a hundred and eighteen, a higher rate than the composed sermon. “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” has twelve in a hundred and ten. On the raw count, the best-loved psalm and one of the greatest hymns in English look more self-absorbed than a church advertisement.

The reason is in the verbs. In Psalm 23 “me” is nearly always the object: he maketh me, he leadeth me, he restoreth my soul, thou anointest my head. In Watts’s hymn every “my” is on its way out: my richest gain I count but loss, my pride, my soul, my life, my all. In the composed chorus “I” is the subject: I am stepping, I can feel, I am chasing, I am claiming. The pronouns are the same. Their position in the sentence is opposite.

The second-person words need the same care. In a prayer, “thou” and “you” address God. In a sermon or an advertisement, “you” is the hearer, and a text made of “you will,” “your best life” and “you belong” is the Gospel of Me spoken in the second person. The counter shows you the number. You have to decide who “you” is.

One caution about using the test on other people. A single song or sermon proves very little. Every hymnbook has first-person hymns in it and every faithful preacher sometimes gives practical advice. What the count measures well is a diet: the same church’s songs over three months, or a year of sermon titles. And the first text to run it on is one’s own prayers.

How the subject changed

Part II showed that seeking God for one’s own ends is as old as the faith. What is recent is something more specific. For most of the church’s history the tendency was treated as a fault to be resisted, and the liturgy, the creeds and the catechisms were arranged to resist it. Over the last two centuries, in parts of the church, it has been adopted as a method. That change can be dated, because the people who made it published their reasons.

Honesty requires one thing to be said first. The movements that put the individual’s experience at the centre arose as protests against something real. German Pietism in the 1670s, the Methodist revival in the 1730s and the American awakenings were reacting to churches in which the creed was recited, the sacraments were administered and nobody appeared to believe a word of it. Their insistence that the faith must be a person’s own was right, and Part XII has shown that Luther said the same. The trouble came later, when “it must be real for me” slid into “it must be about me.”

These are not one movement. Finney was a revivalist, Barton and Peale were apostles of success, Schuller of self-esteem, and the liberal theology Machen and Niebuhr attacked was something else again. Conservative and liberal, revivalist and therapeutic, they disagree about almost everything. What they share is the direction of the sentence. In each, the question the faith answers is a question about me: how I can be converted, succeed, think positively, esteem myself, be happy. The 2005 study is the result seen from the pew. Its authors reported finding this outlook among teenagers across the Christian traditions, and suggested that the teenagers were reflecting the adult religion around them.

And Feuerbach is the warning that should trouble a believer most. The standard atheist account of religion is that God is a projection of human wishes. Against the Christ of the creeds, who is born, crucified, risen and coming to judge, and who commands things nobody wants, that account has little grip. Against a God who exists to affirm, prosper and fulfil me it is simply a description.

Ten quotations follow, from about 420 to 1982. All are real, dated and used on this page. Place each.

Next Sunday

The thesis began as a claim about “modern Christianity.” The only part of modern Christianity a reader can actually examine is the service he attended last week, and himself in it. Jesus’ rule about the beam and the mote applies here as it does everywhere (Matthew 7:3–5): the first Gospel of Me to look for is one’s own.

The comparison below gathers the ten points into one table.

Eight statements about the last service you attended

The first five are about the service. The last three are about you. Answer honestly. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and the result is a prompt for thought and nothing more: one service proves little about a church.

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Twenty-four items. Nearly everything here is free, online and short. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. John 6:1–71; Mark 10:35–52; Job 1–2; Luke 17:11–19. Read this first. Twenty minutes. The loaves, the two requests, the accuser’s question and the nine who did not come back.
2. 2. 1 Corinthians 15:1–11; Acts 2:14–41; Acts 10:34–43; Luke 24:44–48; the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Mark every verb and write beside it who is doing it.
3. 3. Galatians 2:20; Psalm 23; Psalm 51; Psalm 73; Daniel 3:16–18; Habakkuk 3:17–19. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. The first person as Scripture uses it, and “but if not.”
4. 4. 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:5; 2 Corinthians 4:1–7 and 11:16–12:10; Romans 12:1; Ephesians 4:1 and 5:25; Colossians 3:1–17. Twenty minutes. What Paul preached, how he presented himself, and where his instructions begin.
5. 5. Matthew 6:5–13; 1 Corinthians 12:12–27; Ephesians 2:11–22; Hebrews 1:1–4; 2 Peter 1:16–21; Acts 1:21–22 and 26:1–23; Jeremiah 28–29; Romans 8:28–30; Philippians 2:19–21; 2 Timothy 3:1–5 and 4:1–5. Forty minutes. The texts behind Parts VI to X.
6. 6. Augustine, The City of God XV.7; On Christian Doctrine I.3–5 and 22; Confessions I.1. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vols 1 and 2; free at New Advent. Twenty minutes.
7. 7. Pliny the Younger, Letters X.96; Justin Martyr, First Apology 65–67; Cyprian, On the Lord’s Prayer §8. Free at New Advent and elsewhere. Fifteen minutes.
8. 8. The Book of Common Prayer (1662): the General Confession, the Te Deum, the Nicene Creed, the Gloria in excelsis and the words of administration. Free at churchofengland.org. Fifteen minutes. Count the pronouns.
9. 9. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, chapters VIII–X and XV; Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book II, chapter 11. Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Twenty minutes.
10. 10. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, Book I, chapters 20–21. Trans. S. N. Deane (1903); free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Ten minutes.
11. 11. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, scholia on 5:4 (Luther’s Works 25:291); A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels (LW 35:117–24); Lectures on Galatians (1535), on 2:20 and 4:6 (LW 26; the passage quoted in Part IX is at p. 387; Graebner’s abridgement is free at Project Wittenberg); the Torgau sermon of 5 October 1544 (LW 51:333). The Brief Instruction is five pages and is widely reproduced online. Thirty minutes.
12. 12. Luther’s Small Catechism, the Creed and the Sacrament of the Altar; the Smalcald Articles III.viii; the Augsburg Confession VII. Triglot Concordia (St Louis, 1921); free at bookofconcord.org. Fifteen minutes.
13. 13. John Calvin, Institutes III.7.1–2, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845); the Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1; the Articles of Religion, XIX. All free online. Ten minutes.
14. 14. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Part III, the second sign. Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Thirty minutes. The best single treatment of the subject in English.
15. 15. John Wesley, Journal, 24 May 1738; Sermon 37, The Nature of Enthusiasm (1750). Free at the Wesley Center Online. Fifteen minutes.
16. 16. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing (1847), chapter 12, trans. Douglas V. Steere. Ten minutes.
17. 17. Charles Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), Lecture I; Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841), preface to the second edition. Both free online. Twenty minutes.
18. 18. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1923), chapters 2 and 5. Out of copyright in the United States and free online. Forty minutes.
19. 19. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (1939), the chapter “The Day with Others.” Trans. John W. Doberstein (1954). Twenty minutes.
20. 20. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942), Letter 16; Letters to Malcolm (1964), Letter 1; Mere Christianity (1952), the last chapter; “Answers to Questions on Christianity” (1944) in God in the Dock. Thirty minutes.
21. 21. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (1925); Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), chapter 1; Robert H. Schuller, Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (1982). Read a chapter of each in the author’s own words before accepting this page’s account of them.
22. 22. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (1937), chapter 5; Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), chapter 1; Robert N. Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart (1985), chapter 9; Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching (2005), chapter 4. Library books. The last is the one to read if you read only one.
23. 23. Isaac Watts, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” (1707); C. Austin Miles, “In the Garden” (1912). Both out of copyright. Read them side by side and underline the verbs.
24. 24. The words of the last three songs your own church sang, and the text or recording of its last sermon. Do this one. Paste them into the counter in Part XIII. Then do the second pass by hand: underline every verb and write beside it who is doing it. If Christ is doing most of them, be glad and say so to whoever chose the songs. Then try the same with what you prayed this week.

Apart from published social research (the studies of 1985 and 2005 in Part XIV), every individual quoted on this page is deceased, or biblical, and is quoted from a dated, published source; living scholars are named only as the authors of published research. No living preacher or songwriter and no church, congregation or ministry is identified or described. Every modern sermon line, chorus, advertisement, testimony and remark is composed by this page for illustration and does not describe any real person, song or church.