Is Christianity Mostly About “Doing Good”?

In early May I gave a talk at the Mockingbird Ministries Conference in NYC with the title “Isn’t Christianity Really Just About Being Good?”

You can access an audio version of the talk here. It was fun to do and well-received. The only thing about the audio version is that you miss the slides that accompanied the talk. So I’ve added two of my favorite slides in this post.

The subtitle of the talk was, “Notes of a Recovering Pelagian.” Pelagius was a British monk who advocated a theology of works, or the idea that we “save” ourselves by our many good works. He locked horns with Augustine whose less sanguine view of human nature and capacity led Augustine to describe Pelgianism as “a cruel optimism.” Anyhow, I liked the slide which shows the two in an imagined “theological fight night.”

The talk is largely a personal reflection on my own life and learnings as a minister and pastoral theologian. I do think it gets at one of the most durable, and yes cruel, heresies of the church. Pelagianism is very much alive today in all quarters of Christianity, although different types of Christianity have different versions of the works that are required of us in order to be acceptable to God.

Just to be clear, I am wholly in favor of goodness. But there are two ways in which my thinking, and I believe Christian orthodoxy, come at human goodness that differ from Pelagius and his modern day inheritors, many in the mainline churches.

First, our good works are a response to God’s initiative, to God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ. We all need grace, and (good news) grace is available. As it is put in the New Testament, “We love because he first loved us.” And secondly, our good works when truly good and gracious are God’s work in us through grace and the Holy Spirit, which means it’s not about us, but about Jesus working in and through us.

And I tend, with Augustine and Niebuhr, to be a little skeptical about what we humans confidently declare as “good works.” Sometimes we are overly sure of our own goodness and of the goodness of our “good works.” That is suggested by the pejorative phrase “do-gooder.”

Sometimes, at least in my experience, truly good works are done by surprising people who aren’t at all sure of their own goodness or upright moral status, maybe just the opposite. See for example, the forgiven sinner, Mary Magdalene, anointing the feet of Jesus, while Judas huffs about the wasteful extravagance of her gesture of devotion and saying “the money could have been spent for the poor!” Though he had no intention of doing so.

At one point in the talk, as I am about to tell a story about a memorable Ash Wednesday experience, I break for a fictive “word from our sponsor,” The American Church Bulletin Supply Service. I show the slide here, from an actual church in the Northwest this past Ash Wednesday, and urge “Don’t let this happen to you, order your bulletins now from the American Church Bulletin Service.”

When I forwarded my slide deck to the Mockingbird production team I got a note of concern back about the “typo” in this slide. I explained the typo/malapropism was the point.

The Mockingbird audience responds well to humor and to speakers who don’t take themselves too seriously, so I pitched the talk that way and had fun. In that respect, their conference is a refreshing contrast to most of the mainline church conferences and denominational meetings I’ve attended which are so stiflingly earnest and self-important.

Anyhow, hope that you enjoy listening to the talk.