Christian Humility and the Fear of Man

Some virtues are becoming increasingly popular, at least in name, in both Christian and secular discussions today: kindness, respect, compassion, humility. Recently, I’ve been considering the contemporary call to humility and wondering how it might be a perversion of true Christian humility. What tipped me off to this was a conservative Evangelical podcast lamenting how Christians on the political left say that right-wing Christians need more humility on issues like abortion. She argued that they use the word “humility” to make us doubtful and confused on matters clearly revealed by God, summing it up well with the response, “We don’t need to be humble for God.” Listening to her critique, I couldn’t help thinking, “This is what Lutherans deal with all the time in theology.”

In our watered-down Evangelical context, Lutheranism comes across as arrogant. Lutheran confidence makes people uncomfortable and suspicious. Even among Christians, it seems that toleration is translated as celebrating and affirming other confessions. (I had a hard time finishing that last sentence because the words that were coming to mind only confirmed how hard it is for me to break free of this ideology. Positions? Viewpoints? Perspectives? It’s difficult to find a word that doesn’t communicate neutrality.) 

I have a deep desire to be perceived as nice. I add nuance and qualification and water down my statements so that those who disagree will still like me in the end. Of course, there is a place for nuance and acknowledging the complexity of issues that truly are complex. (There I go again, diluting my statement with qualifications.) But I’m becoming more convinced that my impulse isn’t Christian humility. It is the fear of man. And the Bible has some pretty strong things to say on that.

The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe. Proverbs 29:25

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10:28

Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. John 12:42-43

Oh, how I see myself in those timid authorities whose love of glory from man stifled their confession of Christ! It feels so good to receive praise from Christians of other confessions. I want people to like my posts–and, more so, to like me. I like imagining them saying, “She really made me think. Though I disagree, I appreciate her thoughtful, articulate, humble posts.” But this is a desire that silences confession, a fear of man that lays a snare. Whatever else it is, it is not humility.

Christian humility means, first of all, being humble before God. Just as love for God manifests itself in love for the neighbor, so humility toward God requires humility toward one another. But the vertical dimension must take priority. When we reverse the order and only define humility horizontally, we find ourselves in a man-fearing mess. 

Humility toward God is submission to His Word. It is pride, not humility, to cloud and muddy His pure Word. It is arrogant folly to darken the light of Scripture. Is it any wonder that those “who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isa. 5:20) would invert the definitions of pride and humility? Christians must not fall for this tactic of the father of lies. God has spoken. We can be humble before Him, agreeing with Him and confessing His Word to a hostile world, or we can accept the world’s definition of humility and dress the truth in caveats until it is unrecognizable. We can stand by the clear Word of God, or we can add layer upon layer of nuance until it is buried in obscurity. Humility before God will never lead us to twist His Word into something cloudy and unintelligible.

Some examples may be helpful here. Take Romans 3:28: “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” We can say, “Amen” to this and confess the doctrine of sola fide, or we can make ambiguous statements about justification or the phrase “works of the law” until our statement is vague enough to be accepted by Roman Catholics. Similarly, a few chapters later in Romans 6:4, we read, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” Again, we can say, “Amen,” and confess baptismal regeneration, or we can muddy the text with ideas about different kinds of baptisms in the hope of saying something more palatable to Evangelicals.

I almost titled this post Christian Humility and the Fear of Being a Jerk. But I’m not actually afraid of being a jerk; I’m afraid of being perceived as a jerk. I’m afraid of how my Lutheran confession will be perceived by this nice, tolerant, watered-down world. Christ, however, tells me Whom to fear:

“But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows. And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God, but the one who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God.” Luke 12:5-9

May the God who comforts us be our Fear and our Courage!

“I, I am he who comforts you; who are you that you are afraid of man who dies, of the son of man who is made like grass, and have forgotten the Lord, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth . . . ?” Isaiah 51:12-13a

^{Like Daniel, may God grant us humility before Him that inspires courage before men}

A Hill to Die On

Pastor: Do you intend to continue steadfast in this confession and Church and to suffer all, even death, rather than fall away from it?

Catechumen: I do, by the grace of God.

***

My Confirmation Sunday

It was July of 2020. After the long months of wrestling through Lutheran theology before starting catechesis followed by more long months of catechesis interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, I was finally being confirmed in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. There I stood, confessing before the congregation that I acknowledged God’s gifts in Baptism; that I renounced the devil; that I believed in the Triune God and His work of creation, redemption, and sanctification; that I believed all of Scripture to be inspired; that I believed the Lutheran Church’s doctrine drawn from Scripture and expressed in the Small Catechism to be faithful and true; that I intended to hear God’s Word and receive His Sacrament faithfully, and to live according to His Word and remain faithful; and, finally, that I was willing to die for this Church’s confession.

There are some parts of the confirmation rite, such as the phrasing of renouncing the devil and all his works, that may sound a bit old-fashioned, but I think none rubs against our modern sensibilities more than the question and response above. A church that asks you to be willing to die for its teachings! Is this some kind of cult?

As a child, I heard stories about martyrs who died rather than reject Christ. Their faithfulness in the face of death inspired me. But I didn’t give much thought to how many Christians had suffered and even died for smaller matters of the faith, for what some of us would call “minor doctrines.” John the Baptist was martyred not for his primary work of pointing people to Christ but for condemning Herod’s sexual immorality. A crucial factor in the founding of the Missouri Synod was the immigration of confessional Lutherans who were fleeing the threat of forced unionism with the Reformed. Couldn’t John have shut up about sexual immorality in order to maximize his mission and bring more people to Christ? Couldn’t the original LCMS members have agreed to “round off” and get along with the Reformed? Today, they would probably be asked by other Christians if those are really the hills they want to die on.

The funny thing about the idiom “a hill to die on” is that it is almost always used in the negative. I hear people speaking of hills that aren’t worth dying on much more often than hills that are worth dying on. Often we use this expression to question the strength of other people’s convictions: “I can see why you would believe that, but are you sure that’s the hill you want to die on?” Sometimes this question is appropriate. Sometimes we need to be reminded that we are obsessing over matters of adiaphora (Greek, “indifferent”) that are neither commanded nor forbidden in Scripture. But other times we raise this question because of unbelief in the clarity of Scripture.

For Christians, the question of doctrinal hills to die on largely comes down to which doctrines we believe God has clearly revealed in Scripture. If we think He has spoken clearly on doctrines of Creation and Atonement but left matters ambiguous when it comes to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, then we aren’t going to die for our sacramental theology. It can be easy to assume that because Christians disagree on a doctrine, it must not be clear in Scripture. But the cloudiness of our fallen human reason does not negate the clarity of God’s Word. We cannot blame Him for insufficient clarity in speaking when the fault lies in our own unwillingness to hear.

The devil will always come to us with the tempting question of Genesis 3, “Did God really say…?” What if Eve had known what God said but thought it wasn’t sufficiently clear? She might have said, “His words were, ‘Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,’ but I don’t think we can know for sure what He meant by that. It’s fair to interpret that in a number of ways.” Or what if she had known the truth but thought that it wasn’t a big deal? We can imagine her saying, “Well, He told us not to eat from the tree, but I don’t see that as a hill worth dying on. After all, it’s just a piece of fruit. I’m sure God would rather us focus on more important truths.”

We cannot know what part of God’s Word we will be tempted to deny. We do not know whether we will be tested on the Atonement (“Did God really say, ‘It is finished’?”) or on the Lord’s Supper (“Did God really say, ‘This is My body’?”). Some doctrines may seem more glorious to shed our blood for, but we cannot choose that God will call us to die on those hills rather than on hills that look smaller. Doctrine is a connected whole, and hills that appear small in isolation may be indispensable when seen in the complete landscape.

I’ll admit I’m grateful to live in a time of church history when heresy is no longer a capital crime. Maybe when some Christians say that a hill isn’t worth dying on, they mean that it isn’t worth killing on. (This would make sense, given the military origins of the idiom.) If that is the case, I would agree. We should not use our theology to destroy others, whether unbelievers or Christians of other confessions. But we must not translate our unwillingness to kill into a timidity that makes us unwilling to die.

At the end of the day, our salvation does not rest on which hills we are willing to die on. I do not doubt the salvation of Christians who believe only a handful of “major” doctrines are worth dying for. Salvation depends on the One who died on the hill of Golgotha for us. Christianity is not about us dying for Christ but about Him dying for us. Nevertheless, I cannot concede that Christians should reduce their hills to die on when those hills are the very words of life.