Thoughts of a Wretch

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me!

As I have been spending more time around Protestants again, one thing I’ve really felt present is the sense of a state of pervasive wretchedness. Maybe that sounds weird, so let me try to explain.

Having grown up a non-denominational Protestant, the main focus of Christianity becomes Jesus and one’s relationship with Him, primarily manifested in the question, “Are you saved?” “Saved from what?” one may ask. The answer to that question usually has something to do with being saved from Satan, hell, eternal damnation, or something similar.

Now, there’s nothing that is inherently wrong about Christianity regarding Jesus as being the center of our religion. I won’t even argue that we do need saved or that hell sounds like someplace I’d like to avoid at all costs. However, the more time I spend listening to a more Protestant viewpoint, the more I am aware of why I have issues with many of those viewpoints.

One of the things that I’ve pondered at length is the view of the human person. The Protestant perspective seems to be that because of sin, man is wretched, utterly depraved, and incapable of doing anything good. It is only through God’s Grace that man can come to be with Him in heaven. I’m not a theologian by any means, but the perspective that I’ve come to through Orthodoxy is that God created man not just as something good, but as something “very good”. Because of sin, we have a fallen nature, and we have no competency to be restored to God on our own, resulting in the necessity of the sacrifice of God’s only Son. However, there is still a sense that there is something good and – as possessors of souls and bearers of the Image of God – even holy, which is innate to the human person, despite the sin that clings to us so tightly. In the free will that God has given to us, we can turn to him and be perfected, or we can continue on in our own willfulness.

Why does this make a difference? In both case s, we are wretched. I would even wager that in a world filled with “feel good” pastiches of true Christianity (“I’m okay, you’re okay, God loves us all”) there’s almost something comforting in coming back to the idea that is never far in Orthodoxy that one’s own self is chief among sinners.

What makes this different from the Protestant idea of wretchedness comes down to whether there’s anything in mankind worth saving. As many children are, I was very literal in my early understanding, and after years and years of having it drilled in my head that people are absolutely wretched beings who, if God were thoroughly just, ought to be totally obliterated; that this is what we deserve. It feels like it’s an inherited damnation from which there is no escape, that this “love” that God supposedly has for us is also a fire which will burn us up in our entirety, because there is no gold amongst the impurity. I spent years and years begging God that I would be saved, because even as a child, I understood in my bones that simply saying something or thinking something did not make something true. I really felt like I was a wretch not worth loving, and not only did that really affect my relationship with God, but it really affected my relationships with other people as well as my own psychological well-being.

What changed? This might sound really strange, but I had an experience as a 20-year-old, where I was in a familiar place, and it turned light, and not only did God, in His Grace, give me a glimpse of how I was viewed by a dear friend, but for the first time in my life, I felt truly beloved by Him. The experience probably only lasted a couple of minutes, but it was life-changing. Not long after that I “found” the Orthodox Church. To my amazement, despite the emphasis on being “first among sinners”, the idea of wretchedness didn’t hurt me the same way because of the belief that God created us out of love as something “very good” and that has not changed. With our free will, we can choose to flee evil, and God will help us and stay alongside us in that endeavor, and through Jesus we are redeemed to Him.

In the past weeks (and even months) I’ve had many thoughts bouncing through my head, but one of the things that I keep coming back to is the idea that it is incredibly important to hold the idea of being “chief among sinners” in one hand. Wretch, if you will. However, I think in the other hand we need to be able to hold the ideas that 1) we were created in Love because God loves us 2) the sacrifice of Jesus happened because He desires our restoration to Him so badly and 3) even if I (or you – or any one person) were the only person who needed to be redeemed in such a way, He would do it willingly because every single one of us is individually that dear to Him. While those three things certainly can be convicting, at the same time, they serve as comfort. Wretch that I am, I can be chief among sinners without having to believe that there is nothing about me that should be loved.

There’s actually a good bit more string to unravel in this train of thought; I just struggle to be organized in life, and I struggle to sit down and write, and I struggle to get words down that make some sort of sense together. Life is always a work in progress, isn’t it?

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