Living by Mercy
Louis R. Tarsitano on Christian “Self-Help”
Christian bookstores are filled today with “how-to” books. These are, more or less, the religious equivalent of the “self-help” books sold in competing secular establishments.
In both kinds of stores, one can find books for fathers, mothers, children, students, doctors, lawyers, housewives, businessmen, and almost every other sort of person, promising to teach them how to be better at whatever they are doing and how to live happier lives while doing it.
It would be good to be able to say that what sets the Christian books apart from their non-Christian counterparts is the consistent theme that we should live to please God and not ourselves. But this is only occasionally the case. Americans are attracted by the idea of “self-help,” even when we are dealing with God. We like to think that we can do well by doing good, which is a concept that would come as a surprise to the great martyrs, confessors, and missionaries.
One also rarely encounters in contemporary Christian how-to books any sense of our sanctification empowered by grace in a struggle against ourselves. Too often, the fulfillment of our own aspirations, bereft of any sense of the possibility of an unexpected or undesired divine vocation, is presented as our highest possible spiritual achievement. We will be happy, we are told, when we are what we truly want to be, so that God has an absolute duty to assist us in our self-fulfillment.
Often, as well, we are told by famous evangelical pastors to embrace a works righteousness that would have made a Roman Catholic parochial school teacher of the 1950s blush. What goes unexplained is why God should owe us anything at all for doing the good works we were created to do, let alone those “good works” we have defined and chosen for ourselves. It is not, after all, what we do that saves us, but what Jesus Christ has done for us, to the glory of his Father.
We might profit by considering a time when there were fewer books but more good sense about God, and about life in communion with him. If we return to the English Reformation, for example, we find this sound advice about good works in the XIIth Article of Religion:
Albeit that Good Works, which are the fruits of Faith, and follow after Justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God’s judgment; yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively Faith; insomuch that by them a lively Faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by the fruit.
Good works, it turns out, are God’s gifts to us. They are his blessing in our lives, making evident that we have received the gifts of a living Faith and justification in Jesus Christ. They are his demonstration that we are his own and his promise that he will be pleased by all that we do in the name of his Son and in imitation of him. God works in us, and he enables us to work in communion with him, through Jesus Christ, and by the Holy Ghost.
There may be worship, adoration, and obedience in true good works, but no self-help, at least not in the sense that we and our welfare are the focus of our actions. Grace liberates us from ourselves for new life in Jesus Christ, and that life is lived to the glory of the Father alone.
Moving even further back in time, we encounter two handy lists that might prove far more helpful to our Christian living than an entire rack of today’s books. These lists were developed before most Christians could read and before there was paper or ink to spare for today’s over-specialization. They are the lists of the Corporal and the Spiritual Works of Mercy.
Louis R. Tarsitano (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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