My response to Hamilton’s question

My last post quoted Adam Hamilton’s answer to the question “Why do people need Christ?”

Taylor Burton-Edwards unfairly intruded on my turf as blog owner and asked me how I would answer the question. Since most of you probably do not read all the comments, I thought it might continue the conversation if I were to answer here. So, read on if you dare:

I have not unpacked my answer from all the church language — which is a big part of what I see Hamilton doing with his answer. Mine goes something like this.

We need Jesus Christ because we are sinners. We are lost. We are wretches. We are prodigals. We are wandering in the dark. We need Jesus because without him, we are doomed to death and under the power of death.

Hamilton’s answer strikes me as optimistic about human beings who are without God. It seems to have a default position that says we are all in the blessed kingdom of God unless we do something really bad. And even then we want to haggle about whether it would be loving of God to throw us out.

Maybe I’m just too much of an Eeyore as my daughter says, but I start from a different place. We are in rebellion from God. We are the Israelites with the golden calf. The longings of our heart are not to be trusted so long as we resist the preventing and convicting grace of God. The problems we feel and experience are not to be solved by changing our point-of-view or attitude about Jesus, but by the work of grace that convicts and converts.

And maybe it is just because I am reading the gospel lection this week about self-denial and cross bearing, but I do not see the way of Jesus as about solving our problems, per se. It gives us new problems, bigger problems. It calls us to die so that we might live.

I know this way of answering the question puts me out of touch with the times, but my problem with Hamilton’s answer — for me — is that there are lots of way to fill your empty spaces and find hope in your life. The world has figured out many, many ways to respond to our neediness. We might argue that what we in the church are selling is better, but the price we ask for it is higher than the entertainment industry and the self-help industry and the peddlers of vice. We end up in a cost-benefit discussion with people. It feels like selling laundry detergent.

I suspect that Hamilton would not say any of that is true of his preaching and ministry. But this is how I experience it. It may say as much about me as anything.