Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Our blind spots

I'm not quite sure if it's edifying, or infuriating, but one of the most popular things for Christians to do today, apparently, is to discuss the apparent failure of past generations to "get" what is "painfully obvious" to those today.

What's missing, in my opinion, is a similar appraisal of things today--although we do a great job of picking on other people's faults, we have a little more trouble dealing with....our own sins. As if reading my mind, my wife got me a book by Jerry Bridges called "Respectable Sins," which attempts to deal with the "little sins" we so often tolerate while decrying the more wild sins of others.

He does so in a very interesting way; he starts not with the sins that Christians are known to commit involving both mind and body, but rather with the mental sins that we so often commit, and then proceeds to the things that we'd ordinarily call as sin.

Interesting approach--as I read and re-read this, maybe we'll see what his approach does for me and others.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've discovered that anyone who thinks past generations didn't "get it" is usually someone who hasn't done a lot of reading by or about those past generations. The things they "got" will yank the pillow right out from under one's cushy rump.

In fact, you could easily make a case that if they didn't "get" it, we wouldn't have the luxury of our often lazy dilettantism today.

Anonymous said...

IMO the evangelical youth culture gets some of the blame for this. (See, I can identify other people's sins, too!) But seriously, my first exposure to that kind of thing was InterVarsity in college, and they were really all about how college ministry was where it was at, and older people just didn't get it. Mind you it was subtle -- I'm not saying I ever heard anyone come out and say that -- but it was in the air. You got the feeling that HERE, rather than in those dusty old churches, was where it was at. And it doesn't take much for an impressionable adolescent to identify what's "here" with "youthful zeal."

If other youth and college ministries have this tendency, you can see where it leads -- as we internalize it it becomes just "older people," but as we get older and know it can't be US, it must be "previous generations."

Bike Bubba said...

Well, the very fact that I can identify "a preoccupation with other peoples' sins" as a problem is...in itself looking a bit at "other peoples' sins."

Well said on our forebears....sometimes a little bit of grace is needed. Or a lot.

Terry Lange said...

I have the book also. It is sitting on my desk in the "after the seminary semester is over reading stack"