For evangelicals, this sight has all the cultural currency of high-waisted jeans and tucked in v-necks |
Oh yeah, we're hip like that. |
I believe that it is my grateful receipt of these gifts to me that honors an undeserving father. In the same way, what I wanted to counsel my friend was that we only grow greater than our parents in our honor of them. Evangelicalism's excesses are so obvious to my friend. Its historical amnesia, its unawareness of its own role in perpetuating some of our culture's injustices, and its unwillingness to be challenged by the wider church, for many former evangelicals, give the lie to its sense of the felt nearness of God. But we grow past these things not by our disdain but by our honor. Things I have received from evangelicalism: 1) a love for and devotion to the Scriptures; 2) a sense that God's work in the world should create a here-and-now community (this is the evangelical ecclesiology; Catholicism for all its insistence upon the visible Church has an actual life together that repeatedly challenges evangelicals when they convert); 3) a robust sense of the summons to proclaim the Gospel in the world; and 4) an expectation that the God to whom we pray is a God from whom we can expect action. I have seen the finger of God miraculously at work; it was evangelicals who taught me to ask for that and expect that I might see it. These are precious gifts–the kind of thing one should be grateful to receive. A mature child loves and cherishes her parents for the gifts they have been to her without legitimizing their failures. So, friend, disdain your heritage if you will, but all you are doing is lashing yourself to the things you despise; if Genesis is a faithful witness, failure to honor one's parents pretty much dooms one to repeat their mistakes in another key. Honor an undeserving parent, and you not only grow beyond your father's gates, but you become part of how God redeems your father's old age. Thus, by God's good grace, it goes well with you in the land you inherit from your father.