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Holy Boldness
When Bad Things are Done by Good People
Excerpt from Crashing Without Burning
by C. David Matthews
In my first class in systematic theology I was assigned a content book report on the first volume of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man. It caught me at a desperately teachable moment and threw open all my windows and doors. I breathed fresh air. I saw that good and bad are not separate hemispheres but are present and intermingled in all things, save God alone. Am I a good person or a bad person? Neither. Both. My glory is that I am, though finite, created in the image of God. My misery is that I am a sinner. Both are true to my human reality, and they intertwine in me in a genuine paradox. This knowledge can save me from exalted expectations of myself if I accept that I am a sinner, and from despair if I accept that I am made in the image of God. God is the only absolute. All else, including me is ambiguous.
In 1963, Henry Luce invited Paul Tillich to speak at the fortieth anniversary celebration of Time magazine. The site was the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. The audience included 284 subjects of Time cover stories. Tillich sat on the dais next to Adlai Stevenson, not far from Douglas MacArthur. In that rarified company he spoke on the human condition. He insisted that it is consistently ambiguous, an “inseparable mixture of good and evil, of creative and destructive forces.” At both the individual and social levels “there is nothing unambiguously destructive. They accompany each other inseparably.”
This perspective is fortification against disillusionment because it discourages idolatry of all kinds. Only God is perfectly good, completely true. All else exists in the co-mingling gray of ambiguity and paradox. No person, no institution, no nation, no ideology, no created thing is deserving of our absolute, uncritical allegiance. God only is pure light, in whom alone there is no “shadow of turning.” (Jas 1:17, KJV)....
The Bible is full of surprises, which people discover when they actually read it, which doesn’t happen very often. Looking for a safe place to hide your valuables? Try the book of Nahum in the Old Testament. No one will ever look there. An obvious sign, though few see it, of our propensity for idolatry is the way we make the Bible an object of worship instead of a guide to faith. Fetishism lives.
Unstick the pages and you will find that the “Good Book” has a serious shortage of good people. There is one, but he himself attributed goodness only to God, as a genuinely goo person would. The rest look like us. They are moral and spiritual mongrels, possessing in their depths all the light and darkness of the cosmos, stretched to near-breaking by the polarities of their opposite possibilities, and confounded by their own zigzagging between grandeur and shame.
They are not remembered primarily for any goodness they possessed. Most are remembered for their failure, but their failure in relation to God’s goodness. They are remembered for the surprise endings the recreative power of grace fashioned out of their failures.
Is it possible, when judgment fails like a collapsing building, that survival is not the only question? Is there a journey toward one’s true self that begins in the wreckage of some failed intention? Can failure, even moral failure, be creative? When bad things are done by good people, is it the end or a beginning?
C. David Matthew is the author of "Crashing Without Burning." To order, go to the online bookpage or call 1-800-747-3016.
