2 minute read
In Henri Nouwen’s book, Reaching Out, he writes about the three spiritual movements from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality, and from illusion to prayer. This concept of inward spiritual movements have deeply influenced my faith in recent years. In particular, I’ve begun to consider whether there might also be a spiritual movement from perfection to health.
Growing up in Pentecostal churches, Christian faith was always framed within a strict Holiness movement conception of the pursuit of righteousness and perfection. Far from knowing the love and joy of God’s grace, this resulted in a continual inward battle with guilt and shame. The older I get, however, the less I understand what it would even mean for a human to be perfect.
In certain sports, I know what perfection would be. In baseball a perfect game is 27 up and 27 down where no opposing batters reach base. In golf it would be a hole-in-one on every hole for a total score of 18. Yet what would a perfect game in basketball even mean? Imagine a player shoots 30 for 30 from the field, grabs 20 rebounds, has no turnovers, and commits no fouls but the man he was covering scored 18 points. Is that still a perfect game?
The point I’m driving at is that in some contexts the definition of “perfection” is known but in other contexts it’s not. It strikes me that this ambiguity is the norm for most of human life. What would it even mean to be a perfect son or daughter, husband or wife, father or mother? While I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it would mean to utterly fail in those roles, I honestly have no idea what it would mean to succeed perfectly. In most of life, perfection is undefinable.
The same goes for righteousness. Tim Keller defines sin as that which is detrimental to human flourishing. I’m a big fan of that as an umbrella definition of sin, but that seems to leave an awful lot of grey area in this beautiful, broken world. Much human behavior is, at least superficially, neither detrimental to human flourishing nor advantageous to human flourishing. So how does righteousness and perfection fit into that spiritual grey space?
This is why I’ve pretty well rejected the Holiness movement’s spiritual paradigm in favor of a spiritual paradigm about health and well-being. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it a lot easier to perceive if I’m headed toward integration or disintegration, wholeness or brokenness, recovery or relapse, growth or decay. Plus I’m able to do it with grace instead of guilt.
What about the teachings of Scripture, though? Matthew 5:48 reads, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Doesn’t that throw a wrench into all of this? Without getting into a theological treatment of Christian perfectionism or an exegetical deep-dive of that passage, I’ll just say that I’m quite fond of Eugene Peterson’s rendition of Jesus’ words in The Message:
In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.
