Note: Only after writing the below did I remember that I’d previously written a similar (and more polished) reflection years ago, which I had never posted anywhere but have now published to this blog, dated for its completion. But given I wrote that piece over two years ago and my thoughts below are more specific, I thought I’d keep both.
One of the things that was transformational for me in my journey of spirituality as a Christian was realizing that the environment and faith tradition I grew up in was not in fact the only Christian tradition, nor the only real Christian tradition, but was actually one tradition or expression or “movement” among very, very many. Thumbing through the table of contents of Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith’s Devotional Classics and seeing their list of different historical Christian streams—”the Contemplative tradition,” “the Evangelical tradition,” “the Holiness tradition,” etc.—remains a key memory of mine, a point where I could succinctly say for one of the first times, “Ah—that one. That’s the tradition I grew up in.”
I’m sure any expression of Christianity that has a particularly unyielding superiority complex is likely to create some baggage for its adherents, but I think Reformed Christianity, and specifically the version of it I grew up in from middle school through high school and college, creates some unique baggage, which I’ve been slowly unpacking over the years.
To me, a primary fault of this particular stream of Christianity is its unwavering and often obstinate belief in its own correctness, particularly over against other Christians who have arrived at different interpretations of things. I grew up in a church where it was more or less implied that real Christians went to our church (or a church like it, if they lived elsewhere in the state, country, or world), and those who didn’t probably had “questionable theology.” As an impressionable teenager who was already inclined to have a superiority complex over other people in other ways, I adopted this mindset naturally and without much thought. As a result, I walked around with a spiritual hubris and conviction of my own rightness that was remarkable for someone who was not yet a legal adult. It was only years later that I learned that many of those theological positions I had been taught as “right doctrine” were in fact one view or interpretation or perspective or theory among—often—a debated many, and that a number of them were also different from what the broader Christian Church had taught for most of its history. Seeing some of the rigorous debates about these topics among brilliant and respected scholars across Christian traditions, and seeing my own church tradition and upbringing in this context, helped me (slowly) begin to realize that, intentionally or not, I hadn’t been told the whole truth about Christianity growing up. And now that I was discovering more of it, I began to expand my definition of orthodoxy to be much more historical, much more ecumenical, and much less rigid and self-assured (or, in a word, less dogmatic).
A second major fault of this tradition I grew up in is its strong emphasis on sin—specifically, how bad sin is, how bad being a sinner is, and the importance of not sinning and instead engaging in right behavior, or being holy. This focus on (individual) sin was in actuality a fixation and overemphasis on it that created what Dallas Willard called a “gospel of sin management,” whereby the Christian life is reduced down to the management of bad behaviors and robbed of the magnitude, mystery, and life that Jesus himself proclaimed.¹ In hindsight, much of my Christian practice in adolescence, influenced heavily by the church I grew up in, was alarmingly similar to that of the first-century Pharisees who were concerned primarily with outward behavior and religiosity, and whom Jesus rebuked sternly for that very reason. Like them, I was fixated on identifying right and wrong doctrine and right and wrong behavior, and I harshly judged those I deemed to be wrong (at least internally, if not externally). I imagine for those outside my particular theological camp I was not a particularly loving person, and I didn’t approach them or their beliefs with curiosity or openness, but with skepticism and an assumption of their incorrectness and inferiority.
This is all to say, two key points in my growth and maturity as a follower of Jesus were realizing that my Christian background and upbringing were a Christian tradition and not the Christian tradition and, in comparing that tradition to others, seeing some of its overemphases and errors and correcting for them as I determined appropriate.
¹See Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, particularly Chapter 2, in which he examines gospels of sin management on both the theological left and right. Regarding the right (since it is the tradition I grew up in and am critiquing here), he says, “When all is said and done, ‘the gospel’ for [Charles] Ryrie, [John] MacArthur, and others on the theological right is that Christ made ‘the arrangement’ that can get us into heaven. In the Gospels, by contrast, ‘the gospel’ is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus the Anointed.”