Modern educationalists and psychotherapists turn away now - the gospel has a guilty secret.
It can make people feel a bit guilty.
Jesus sometimes had the effect of making people feel guilty. Paul sometimes made Christians feel a bit guilty. The Holy Spirit has convincing the world of its guilt at the heart of His work (John 16:8). When Peter fell on his knees before Jesus wracked with a sense of sinful inadequacy we aren't to imagine that he was wrong to have such feelings (Luke 5:8).
It's important to remember all this because statements such as "The gospel isn't about making people feel guilty," when repeated often enough by enough people, can start to sound almost biblical.
This desire for a 'guilt-free' gospel is driven in part by elements of modern education and psychotherapy. It is the belief that negative feelings are inevitably harmful and should be avoided, that building self-esteem is paramount and so anything that might make me feel bad about myself should be vigorously rejected. Indeed in our post-modern culture anything that might make a person feel inadequate or at fault (such as chastisement, rebuke and disapproval) is often viewed as tantamount to abuse. So, for example, when it comes to parenting and personal development we find that praise, affirmation and reward are now the only tools left in the box.
"I regret my mistake." It's the stock PR response to having had an affair, fiddled expenses or having caused a fracas or altercation (a punch-up, to you and me). The words are chosen to give an appearance of contrition but not so much as to merit serious consequences.
After all, we all 'regret' things in life – not learning to play the piano, not asking someone out, not visiting an elderly relative before they died. It is the wistfulness of a missed opportunity, of something we'd do differently if we were to start again, but not something we necessarily attach great moral significance to. As for 'mistakes', well, we all make them. There's an accidental quality to 'mistakes', a haphazardness – not the kind of thing someone does deliberately or knowingly, not the kind of thing you attach blame to.
It's all a far cry from, "I'm sorry for my sin" – a statement that conveys a much deeper sense of moral failure and personal responsibility. Indeed it's a far cry from biblical repentance that recognises the action as not just ill-timed or unfortunate but standing in fundamental opposition to God's character and deserving of judgment.
Contemporary church culture, influenced by such trends and perhaps in reaction to examples of graceless preaching, has in some quarters quietly watered down the whole notion of repentance as a foundational and life-long aspect of true Christianity. Instead the gospel is presented as simply faith and grace. But like a tripod with a leg missing, the omission of repentance is a recipe for instability.
The effect is a view of sin that seeks to either to manage it or minimise it. On the one hand dealing with sin becomes a matter of self-improvement. On the other hand we just don't think that sin is that much of a problem. Approaches like this will lead, in time, to either to despair or to pride.
Yet even a cursory scan of the Bible will observe just how much of it is taken up with sin and its concomitant guilt. Sin is the key plot point of Scripture – "How will this problem be overcome?" Chapter after chapter the prophets forensically examine the issue of sin, every dimension of human life is exposed as corrupted, tainted and deserving of judgment. Neither is the New Testament embarrassed about highlighting our sin and the need for appropriate repentance. The sheer volume of material devoted to this subject tells us that this is not something God seems minded to skim over.
Only when we see just how inexcusably rotten and ruined we are will we fully appreciate just how merciful God is and how astonishingly loving Jesus was to take that guilt from us. As a previous generation well observed, "Shallow thoughts of sin create shallow thoughts about the Cross."
There is a real danger, in a Church culture desperate to present itself as a 'feel-good fix' to life's problems, that we present a gospel which begins and ends with 'acceptance and glory'. A gospel in which sin is skated over and guilt, godly sorrow and repentance are airbrushed out. But like the crown without the Cross, salvation without repentance is a half-gospel that never quite adds-up.
People don't like feeling bad – but feeling bad can sometimes do us good.
