http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16291219/how-can-i-explain-christian-joy-to-unbelievers
Audio Transcript
Welcome to the Ask Pastor John podcast, especially if this is your first time here — welcome. I’m Tony, the host, and I pitch questions to longtime pastor and author John Piper. That’s his name. We talk about life’s most challenging questions, and what the Bible has to say about those challenging questions. Maybe you just happened to see this episode online, or maybe someone sent you this link, a friend or someone. Welcome.
We do all this by taking questions from our audience, and today’s question comes from a listener named Rebecca. “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast. It has blessed me, guided me, and strengthened my faith over the years. My question for you is this: How would you explain your experience of joy in God to a curious, unchurched non-Christian? Where would you begin? And how would you do it with language a non-Christian could easily follow?”
Okay, let’s do it this way: I’ll write a short letter to an imaginary unbeliever named Michael, who has almost no experience of church or religious language, and who has asked me this very question, to tell him what it means when I say, “I experience joy in God.” Here we go.
Dear Michael,
You asked me what I mean when I say, “I experience joy in God.” Thanks for asking. There are not many things, Michael, that I enjoy talking about more than what I value, what I treasure, most. You already know that my experience of God is based on the Bible. I believe it is the word of God. I believe that if you read it, especially its portrayal of Jesus, you can hear the ring of truth, the self-authenticating reality of God breaking through. So, the first thing to say is that when the Bible talks about our relationship with God, it rings with the language of pleasure.
In other words, I’m not just responding to the Bible with my own peculiar personality. No, I’ve been told by the Bible, by God himself through the Bible, that I should experience God as my pleasure. It’s what God demands, not just what I desire. God’s word is lavish with pleasure language. So, let me give you some examples so you can get the feel of what I mean. You can ask me sometime later, and I’ll show you these places actually in the Bible itself so you can read them for yourself. I think that would be helpful.
- Psalm 16:11: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
- Psalm 90:14: “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”
- Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
- Psalm 32:11: “Be glad in the Lord.”
- Psalm 19:10: “More to be desired are they [your words, O Lord] than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.”
- Isaiah 52:7: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news . . . of happiness.”
- Philippians 4:11, 13: “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content . . . through [Christ] who strengthens me.”
- Philippians 4:4, just a little earlier in the chapter: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.”
- Isaiah 26:3: “You keep him in perfect peace . . . because he trusts in you.”
- Psalm 4:7: “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.”
- Psalm 63:1–3: “My soul thirsts for you . . . because your steadfast love is better than life.”
That’s for starters, Michael, scraping the surface of the Bible. Peace, rejoicing, contentment, happiness, gladness, delight, satisfaction, pleasures — all of it sweeter than honey, all of it better than wine, all of it better than life itself, as full as it can be, as long as it can be.
Now the question is, How do I experience God that way? How does John Piper do that? And the first thing to say is that God himself has taken out of the way the greatest obstacle to my happiness — namely, my ugly, God-belittling sin, and his just and holy wrath and fury against it. He sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world to die in my place. The Bible says that he became a curse for me. He condemned my sin in the death of his own Son. And he did this for absolutely everyone, indiscriminately, who would believe in him.
So, when I receive Jesus Christ — when I take him, welcome him, embrace him as my Savior and my Lord and the treasure of my life — God sees me as united to Jesus, so that his death counts as my punishment, and his righteousness counts as my right standing before God. So, now there’s no condemnation for me. I’m forgiven for everything. No guilt, no punishment, no hell, no fear; accepted, adopted, loved, befriended, embraced — as a father running out to welcome a long-lost son.
That’s the beginning. That’s the foundation, Michael, of all my joy. Everything great and beautiful and valuable and desirable and satisfying in God is no longer dangerous for me. It’s like a mountain range of endless discovery of more and more beauty, where I will never fall off a ledge and die, but go further up and further in forever and ever, because God is infinite and I’m not.
Michael, every day I read my Bible, and in the Bible, God himself, through the words that he inspired, speaks to me — and I speak back to him. This is a real conversation. I don’t hear voices; I read his inspired word addressed to his people, to me. I hear the voice of God in his precious word, and it is sweeter than honey. That’s what the Bible calls fellowship with God. And every day, as we enjoy this fellowship, he shows me glimpses of his greatness and his beauty and his worth: the very things that I was made for. I was made to see and enjoy God in his greatness, his beauty, his worth.
And you know this is true, Michael — you know this. You were made to see and enjoy greatness and beauty and worth and love. Everybody was. God is the sum of all greatness, and all beauty, and all value and worth, and all love. And he lets us enjoy him through his word, and through his world, which also reveals his beauty and greatness. And when I face the ugliness and the sin and the suffering and the disasters of the world, he reminds me of spectacular promises that I will one day be with him — free from all pain, all sin, all depression, all discouragement, all anxieties — in a brand new, magnificent body.
And with that hope, which he renews every day in me through his word, he gives me strength to go out into the world and to try to be useful to people by doing good and pointing people to everlasting satisfaction in him (which is what I’m doing right now, I hope). And even though I’m not perfect, Michael — you know that pretty well — he helps me do that, and he forgives me for my failures, my shortcomings. And at the end of the day, my conscience is clean. Oh, the sweetness and joy of a clear conscience. My conscience is clean because there has been some measure of obedience. And because of his precious, precious forgiveness through Jesus, I can lay my head down at night on a pillow with peace and joy.
You know that’s what I want for you, Michael. That’s why I’m writing this letter, and I’m happy to talk anytime you want to take it further.
Your friend,
John
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Assurance for the Unassured: Finding Hope in the Names of God
For a certain kind of Christian, assurance of salvation can feel as fickle as a winter sun. Here and there, the sky shines blue and bright, filling the soul with light. Far more often, however, the days are mostly cloudy, the sun shadowed with uncertainty. And then sometimes, the sky goes gray for weeks on end, and the heart walks heavily under the darkness of doubt.
From the outside, such Christians may seem to bear much spiritual fruit: friends may mark the grace in their lives, accountability partners may encourage them, pastors may find no reason to question their faith. But for those under the clouds, even healthy fruit can look pale and sick. So even as they read their Bible, pray, gather with God’s people, witness, and confess their sins, they usually find some reason to wonder if they really belong to Christ.
How does assurance sink into the heart and psyche of those prone to second-guess? The Holy Spirit has many ways of nourishing confidence in his people — not least by teaching us to recognize the fruit he bears. But for the overly scrupulous among us, for whom personal holiness always seems uncertain, the Spirit also does more: he lifts our eyes above the clouds to show us God’s unchanging character.
Among the divine qualities he uses to nurture our assurance, we may find one surprising: God’s infinite commitment to his glory.
For the Sake of His Name
At first, God’s commitment to his glory may seem to weaken, not strengthen, a doubting Christian’s assurance. If God does everything “to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:14), for the fame of his name, what hope do we have — we who daily fall short of that glory, who often dishonor that name? We would need to find assurance elsewhere, it would seem.
Yet those who pay attention will find God’s zeal for his name running like a silver thread of hope through all the Scriptures. When Israel’s army fell before Ai, “What will you do for your great name?” was Joshua’s cry (Joshua 7:9). When the nation sinned by demanding a human king, Samuel assured the fearful, “The Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake” (1 Samuel 12:22). When, later, Israel teetered on the brink of exile, Jeremiah pleaded, “Do not spurn us, for your name’s sake” (Jeremiah 14:21). And when the nation languished in Babylon, Daniel grounded his bold prayers on “your name” (Daniel 9:19).
Again and again, the guilty people of God appeal not only to God’s mercy, but to his unflinching allegiance to his glory. Save us, restore us, keep us, defend us — and do it for the sake of your name! So what did they know about God’s name that we may not?
His People, Their God
First, they knew that God, in unspeakable mercy, had condescended to put his name upon his people (Numbers 6:27). By making a covenant with Israel — taking them as his people, pledging himself as their God — he wrapped up his glory with their good; he wove his fame together with their future.
The surrounding nations knew, as Daniel prayed, that “your city and your people are called by your name” (Daniel 9:19). And so, when God lifted up his people, he lifted up his name; when God helped his people, he hallowed his name. Through Israel’s welfare, he trumpeted his own worth, showing himself as the only living God in a world of lifeless idols.
No doubt, God’s name proved useless to those who presumed upon it, who chanted “The Lord! The Lord!” so they could keep sinning in safety (Jeremiah 7:8–15). When Israel’s unrepentant ran to God’s name for refuge, they found the door locked. But for the humble repentant, God’s name stood like the strongest tower (Proverbs 18:10). They might be sinful and unworthy in themselves, but God had given them his name — and for the sake of that name they found mercy, forgiveness, safety, and help.
“The name of God is the hand of God reaching down to helpless sinners, bidding them to grab on and not let go.”
John Owen writes, “God in a covenant gives those holy properties of his nature unto his creature, as his hand or arm for him to lay hold upon, and by them to plead and argue with him” (Works, 6:471). The name of God is the hand of God reaching down to helpless sinners, bidding them to grab on and not let go.
The Lord, the Lord
Second, these saints knew something about God’s name that would have been too wonderful to believe if God himself had not revealed it: at the heart of God’s name is not only the glory of greatness, but the glory of grace.
When the Lord himself “proclaimed the name of the Lord” to Moses (Exodus 34:5), here is what he said:
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty. (Exodus 34:6–7)
To be sure, God is zealous to display the glory of his greatness — his holiness, his power, his authority, his eternity. When he raised up Pharaoh, for example, “so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth” (Exodus 9:16), he wanted all nations to tremble before the plague-sending, tyrant-crushing, slave-freeing God of Israel. He is “the great, the mighty, and the awesome God” (Deuteronomy 10:17).
Yet, as God reveals to Moses, he is not content merely to show the glory of his greatness; he also exalts the glory of his grace — his kindness, his patience, his abounding love and faithfulness. Unlike so many gods of the nations, mercy, and not only might, sits on the throne of his glory. Well then might we say with Micah, “Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression” (Micah 7:18) — and who glorifies his name by showing grace?
But we can say even more. For in the fullness of time, God lifted up his name in a way wholly unexpected, altogether glorious: by lifting up his Son.
Assurance in Every Syllable
When God sent his Son into the world, he sent him with a name — with many names, in fact. And in his mercy, God was pleased to inscribe assurance in nearly every syllable.
Some of Jesus’s names do speak directly of his greatness, calling forth fearful awe. He is the Lord who commands creation, the King who rules the nations, the Judge who sifts men’s hearts, the Holy One who terrifies demons. But in line with the revelation of God’s name to Moses, so many of Jesus’s names testify to the glory of his grace.
For how will he get glory as Savior unless he saves the utterly lost to the uttermost? How will he get glory as servant unless he bends to wash our filthy feet? Or how will he get glory as redeemer unless he sets the captives free?
As Lamb of God, his glory rests on cleansing the worst sins with his most-worthy blood. As bridegroom, his glory shines in the forgiven splendor of his bride. And as the way, his glory leads lost sinners home.
Now, as heavenly advocate, he glories to bear our names in his scars. As head of the body, he gloriously nourishes and cherishes his members below. And as founder and perfecter, his glory redounds when he finishes the faith he begins.
“This Jesus will not lose one jewel in his crown of names.”
We could go on, showing how the glory in the names propitiation, bread of life, light of the world, and more is a glory made for sinners’ good. This Jesus will not lose one jewel in his crown of names. He will not let his glory as mediator be diminished by one lost case, or his glory as shepherd be tarnished by one devoured sheep, or his glory as high priest be brought low by one needy, trusting sinner left without help.
Such names shine like so many suns in the sky above, each a burning assurance meant to chase away our clouds.
His Glorious Grace
Now, knowing that God saves sinners for his name’s sake may not resolve all our doubts. After lifting our eyes to such unclouded skies, we may lower them again upon a world of gray, wondering if God is saving us for his name’s sake. So how might this sight of God’s character help the hesitating soul?
First, simply fixing our gaze on God rather than self may do much to nurture spiritual health. If we often live in the cellar of the soul, trying to judge our spiritual fruit in the dim light of scrupulous introspection, long and regular looks at God may lift us into sun-lit skies, where for a few wonderful moments we forget ourselves, and then perhaps dare to believe that the light of this God can swallow any darkness, even ours.
Second, meditating on God’s grace-filled commitment to his name may remove the deep, subconscious suspicion that God’s glory and our salvation are somehow at odds. We may begin to feel, and not only say, that this shepherd would rejoice to carry us home upon his shoulders, that this father would run to see our silhouette on the horizon.
If you want a deeper sense of assurance, then, by all means keep killing your sin and pursuing the holiness “without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). But also labor to travel often above the clouds, where you remember that God created this world not only “to the praise of his glory,” but “to the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:6, 14). And therefore, all of God’s zeal for his glory, all of God’s love for his name, stands behind the sinner who casts his soul on Christ.
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The Search for Manly Men of God: A History of Muscular Christianity
ABSTRACT: In the mid-nineteenth century, a growing number of Christians looked at the church and noticed a distinct lack of both men and masculinity. Women outnumbered the men in seemingly all quarters, and many of the men who remained seemed feminine, emasculated by an industrialized society and a church that catered to the female sex. In response, some Protestant leaders began a movement that would come to be called Muscular Christianity. Muscular Christians sought to reach and reclaim men with a focus on practical religion and physical strength. The movement dwindled in the years after World War I, but its secularized legacy remains today, and the questions it asked still look for answers from churches facing many of the same problems.
For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, Greg Morse draws lessons from the history of the Muscular Christianity movement.
This is the story of a time when Christianity wanted more muscle and more men. The ancient and true religion had, in the eyes of more than a few, grown flabby and soft. One prescription in the nineteenth century read, “More discipline, more mission, more muscle.” The Muscular Christianity movement, finding its peak physique in America from 1880 to 1920, concerned masculinity. As proponents saw it, “masculinity” (a term they coined to describe the rugged side of maleness) roamed the church as an increasingly endangered species.
The movement, originating in England, originally among liberal Protestants, gained momentum in America and sought to pump more testosterone into Western Christendom. Proponents attempted to treat with one cure both men’s glaring absence from the church and the thin virility of the few lads who remained.
To understand the XY-mindset of Muscular Christianity, we must first view the state of manhood as they saw it. Then we can explore the movement’s response, analyze its legacy and downfall, and finally glean a few lessons for manhood within the church today.
Feminizing Fertilizer
Before we look at the perceived deficiencies in the Victorian man, consider him first in his context. His detractors cited one major accelerant to his downfall.
Accelerant, because the crisis of masculinity in the Western church, both in its disproportion of women to men and in the quality of men it produced, predates the nineteenth century.1 Yet something significant hastened Western Christianity’s man-problem in the 1800s. “If the seeds of Christianity’s feminization were planted in the Middle Ages,” posit Brett and Kate McKay, “those seeds came to full fruition in the 19th century. The fertilizer? The Industrial Revolution.”2
Several significant shifts occurred as the West mechanized. Men left their homesteads and the untilled fields of an agrarian society for the hustle and bustle of the city. This fractured the home base, introducing the splintered modern household we know as the norm today.
Yet this move also “sapped white-collar virility.” One writer illustrates the shift, contrasting his day in 1889 to just one hundred years prior:
There was more done to make our men and women hale and vigorous than there is today. Over eighty percent of all our men then were farming, hunting, or fishing, rising early, out all day in the pure, bracing air, giving many muscles very active work, eating wholesome food, retiring early, and so laying in a good stock of vitality and health. But now hardly forty percent are farmers, and nearly all the rest are at callings — mercantile, mechanical, or professional — which do almost nothing to make one sturdy and enduring.3
“The race,” one man lamented, “was dying; dying of its own stupidity; dying from in-doorness.”4 The new professional and managerial revolution fluffed the spirit of masculinity in particular and atrophied its body. This shift away from the hard-working farmer’s ethic to urban life — with its factories, specialties, and inert office spaces — corrupted, in many minds, what came to be known as the Victorian gentleman.5
Victorian Gentleman
The common complaint of those top hats glancing down at pocket watches held in gloves covering trimmed nails is summarized nicely in one word: overcivilized.
“Overcivilization,” writes historian Clifford Putney, “meant excessive, body-denying intellectualism, the fruit of which was emasculation — physical and cultural.”6 Overcivilization dried the sweat and smoothed the callouses of men, leaving refined tastes, sensibilities, and decorum in their stead.
Future president, muscular Christian, and author of The Strenuous Life (1901), Teddy Roosevelt (1858–1919), a man “who transformed himself via boxing and barbells from a sickly house-bound teenager into the rough-riding, safari-going, big-stick-wielding Bull Moose of legend,”7 noted a “general tendency among people of culture and education . . . to neglect and even look down on the rougher and manlier virtues, so that an advanced state of intellectual development is too often associated with a certain effeminacy of character.”8
Putney cites Henry James’s critique in his 1886 novel The Bostonians as giving a voice to many detractors:
The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and fake delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t look out, will usher in a reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been.9
The Victorian ideal of gentility, from this view, proposed that a man become the finely manicured lawn in front of the well-kept home called society — a cheap substitute for the more rugged and productive field of former times. And over time, this single development toward modernity began to wobble the perception that men belonged within Western Protestantism.
Not Your Father’s Religion
The disproportion of females to males in church has always existed on American shores. Beginning in the seventeenth century, New England church rolls record more female attendance than male — even though men outnumbered women three to two.10 Puritan preacher Cotton Mather (1663–1728) added his testimony to the fact:
There are far more Godly Women in the world than Godly Men. . . . I have seen it without going a mile from home, that in a Church of three or four hundred Communicants, there are but a few more than one hundred Men, all the rest are Women.11
Into the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the trend persisted. During the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s, the revivalist strategy was said to “approach the men through their wives.”12 Editorialists asked pertinent questions: “Why Do Men Not Go to Church?” and “Have We a Religion for Men?” The former claimed to observe that nearly three-fourths of church members were women, while the latter wondered aloud, “Is the genius of Christianity foreign to the masculine make-up?”13 Men for centuries have drawn the conclusion that “the church of God is, to a very great extent, an army of women.”14
The dawn of the industrial world did little to correct the sentiment. Men left the home to work in Babylon, exposed and infected by the dirt and grime of the secular world, while at the same time the home transformed into an Edenic realm of unpolluted mothers and children in comparison. As the public sphere grew more masculine, the home blossomed more feminine. Men left the religious instruction of children to mothers. The business world became the man’s; the Christian world was left to women, children, and soft-sounding clergy.
Effeminate Clergy
“Unhappily for exponents of a virile ministry,” Putney writes, “people’s reigning image of the clergyman was of someone sensitive and refined, someone more comfortable at women’s teas than at men’s sporting competitions.” Historian Ann Douglas concurs in her treatment on the time period, frankly identifying many liberal ministers as “‘mama’s boys’ whose health was fragile and whose friendships were with women.”15 While some of the most influential churches of the day escaped the critique, “the dominant churches of nineteenth-century New England had long been feminized.”16
This, to its critics, was a generational reality. Those destined for ministerial ranks were “weak, sickly boys with indoor tastes who stayed at home with their mothers and came to identify with the feminine world of religion.”17 Unitarian minister Thomas Higginson griped of Protestant churches, “They were filling the ministry with men who lacked ‘a vigorous, manly life,’ and they were encouraging parents to say of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring, ‘He was born for a minister,’ while the ruddy, the brave, and the strong are as promptly assigned to a secular career!”18
“Namby-pamby” seemed one of Charles Spurgeon’s favorite criticisms in his sermons. The manly Victorian preacher, whom Andrew Bradstock connects to the Muscular movement,19 balked at the “vicious refinement” of the day.20 He preferred the so-called vulgarities of good old Saxon words, calling things by their right names, to “the namby-pamby style of modern times, in which sacred things are spoken of as if they were only meant to be whispered in drawing-rooms, and not to be uttered where men meet in everyday life.” “A man of God,” Bradstock quotes Spurgeon in his chapter by the name, “is a manly man.”21
Weekly Mother’s Day Service
As career-minded men largely chose business over leadership in churches, leadership fell to less “manly” men and, with the Sunday school movement, to women.22 Sermons bent toward females. Calvinist theology was displaced. Christ’s gentler characteristics became emphasized, along with women’s spiritual leadership in the home and the church.23
“The more feminine services became, the more men stayed away; and the more women outnumbered men in the congregation, the more ministers catered to their needs.”24 Ann Douglas describes this “symbiotic relationship” that developed between these lighter ministers and their mostly female flocks: “The ministers were caught in a vicious paradox. The women were their principal supporters. Accepting feminine help meant in part prolonging their own exile from masculine concerns; refusing it hardly guaranteed new and different adherents.”25
With this relationship intact, Douglas describes that “the Sabbath came to be heralded as a sort of weekly Mother’s Day.”26 One onlooker remarked of this trend, “There will not be men enough in heaven to sing bass, when ‘The Song of Moses and the Lamb’ is rendered by the redeemed before the Great White Throne.”27
Pushups and Practical Religion
Enter the Muscular Christianity movement — a movement focused on the practical, focused on the body, focused on the world, and focused on making boys into men.
Muscular Christianity had two main aims: to increase men’s commitment to their health and to their faith.28 That is, to take men out of a Jane Austen novel and put them into the gym and onto the battlefield for Christ. But what did this entail? The movement emphasized what they considered a brawny Christianity — manlier ministers, punchier sermons, manlier songs, a more masculine Jesus, and an emphasis on doing good in the world through the social gospel.29 “For many in Victorian England muscular Christianity meant macho,”30 writes David Rosen — though the movement had a less-than-macho origin.
Beginning Pages
Muscular Christianity did not have its birthplace in the pews or on the battleground, but rather in the pages of literature. Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, two Englishmen fed up with the effeminacy and physical weakness tolerated in the Anglican church, began writing novels, the likes of which their derogators called “Muscular Christianity.”31
Christian Socialists, critics of a disembodied evangelicalism, and disapprovers of industrialism’s effect on English society and its men, Hughes and Kingsley promoted an athletic, patriotic, and missional manhood32 alongside “a virile, strong-armed Christianity, a man’s religion, so to speak, that melded courage and faith, spirit and body.”33
Hughes’s Tom Brown Schooldays (1857) was arguably the most successful of the novels. Filled with rugby, footraces, positive male role models and nearly an all-male cast, the book promoted an example for schoolboys of “principled strength.”34
In his book Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Hughes gives an instructive look behind the scenes into the creed he sought to narrate in his books, as well as one key criticism of the movement he aimed to undermine:
The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.35
Kingsley and Hughes, with many similarities and dissimilarities, took the pen to sketch out what they believed young men needed: faith, goodness, and physical strength.
Primitive Bodies, Civilized Ideals
To modern ears, the last of these three may strike us as odd. What do push-ups have to do with eternal life and faithful Christian living? The McKays helpfully summarize several lines of reasoning built within Muscular Christianity’s framework:
Physical training builds the stamina necessary to perform service for others.
Physical strength leads to moral strength and good character.
Sports provided a platform to evangelize the unchurched.
Physical sports and exercise connect boys and men with masculinity.36And recall the backdrop of “overcivilization” nagging at the Muscular Christian’s mind. Sitting, typing, and managing did not properly steward the strength given from God to men for worldwide good.
In the best of the movement, power did not serve as an end in itself, as voiced by Hughes. The Muscular Christian did not want to simply travel back in time “to do preindustrial chores such as hunting and farming; [the body] had a higher purpose. Instead of just being a tool for labor, the body was viewed by muscular Christians as a tool for good, an agent to be used on behalf of social progress in world uplift.” The goal was “primitive bodies to further civilized ideals.”37
The creed that upheld this? The social gospel, which emphasized practicing the social ethic of Christianity, but to the minimizing of orthodox belief. “Convinced that the archetypal buttoned-down Victorian gentleman was ill-equipped to handle the challenges posed by modernity, many Progressives proposed a new model for manhood, one that stressed action rather than reflection and aggression rather than gentility.” Given this world uplift, and the chiseled arms of Christian men holding it up, all attainable health became a duty; all avoidable sickness, a sin.38
Legacy
To highlight a few more specifics of the movement, we look to the legacy. What came of this predominantly liberal Protestant movement that peaked in America from the 1880s to the 1920s?
YMCA
David slayed a giant, Jacob wrestled the angel, Jesus and his disciples walked miles, and Muscular Christians prepared their bodies for good works in places still in operation today. The foremost being the YMCA.
Many modern readers will be surprised to realize that the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association, was originally just that: a Christian organization. And many more will be surprised that the first iterations in England and the U.S. did not have what many consider their trademark today: gyms.
At first its purpose was simply the evangelization of young men in the cities through traditional means: tent meetings, street corner preaching, and pamphleteering. But once the New York City “Y” pioneered the use of gymnasia as a means of Christian outreach in 1869, English YMCAs generally followed suit.39
The YMCA used gyms to attract the interest of boys not interested in Bible studies and teas, and sought to give them purpose: committed souls to Christ and fit bodies for social service. Muscular Christianity even aggressively promoted mission work, in conjunction with the acclaimed Student Volunteer Movement, as hard work, heroic work — manly work.
But as we can see from modern-day YMCAs, the focus grew more and more secular, less about souls and more about “character building” and fitness for its own sake.40 Factions deepened between religious instructors and the ex-circus men who typically led the gymnastics instruction. The weaker brother complained about the “physical department being unmanageable and a disgrace to the Association,” and the stronger about the “spider-legged, namby-pamby hypocrites in management who want them to play girls’ games.”41 The latter eventually unseated for former, serving as a parable for the whole movement.
Boy Scouts
The Muscular movement did not just focus on the brawn of its current men, but gave attention to its future men — a future many in the movement considered bleak. The schools they considered too bookish, too sanitized, too domestic under its “army of women teachers” who were unfit to impart a masculine education.42 The church, with its Sunday schools also “manned by women,” could not give the “hero-worshiper” a suitable champion to imitate.43 Therefore, they created youth “gangs” such as the Boys Brigade, Knights of King Arthur, and the most successful, the Boy Scouts.
The Boy Scouts took spirited boys and taught them to hone the inner (and sometimes buried) primitive inclinations on camping trips away from their mothers. It “took ‘sissified’ boys from the suburbs and sent them on rigorous trips into the forest . . . to endow white boys with ‘brute strength’ and basic survival skills.”44 Going the way of the Y, character building and wholesome values eventually outstripped its initial spiritual component, transforming it into the secular-humanist project we know today.
Sport Culture
“By far the biggest impact of Muscular Christianity,” write the McKays, “has to do with the way it shifted societal perceptions of physicality.”45 Our sports and fitness culture today, detached as it is from faith, is Muscular Christianity’s greatest legacy.
Prior to the movement, Protestant America frowned upon sport. Historian Richard Swanson adduces four reasons:
The belief that recreation distracted from spiritual devotion.
The belief that recreation wasted time.
The belief that recreation stood as a gateway to taverns and gambling.
The belief that recreation would prove too addictive for fallen human nature.46The movement helped breach these assumptions, storming the shores of American culture and making way for the all-too-addictive fitness and sport culture common today — a culture that neo-muscular Christian movements today try to utilize for better purposes.47
Atrophy of a Movement
The peak, at least in its more successful American iteration, came to a close in the 1920s. After 1920, Putney writes, “pacifism, cynicism, church decline, and the devaluation of male friendships combined to undercut muscular Christianity — at least within the mainline Protestant churches.”48
The Great War dealt a mighty blow to muscular rhetoric. The aftermath of WWI
extinguished much of the energetic idealism of the previous decades, and replaced it with disillusionment and cynicism. There wasn’t much societal appetite for talk of keeping one’s body in fighting shape, nor of the celebration of masculine, battle-related virtues like courage or honor. Notions of Christian chivalry got significantly muddied in the trenches.49
The end of WWI dampened the nationalistic zeal and clouded the nation in cynicism concerning the need for fit, soldier-ready bodies.
Along with this cynicism came a devaluation of the church and religion in general. Alternative answers to life’s hard questions arose. A new religion survived, less interested in saving the world as it was “being good to yourself.”50 Radios and cars, a new era of entertainment, and golf on Sundays took hacks at religious commitment. Pastoral authority also waned, giving way to the psychologist.51 The soothing tones of the therapist drowned out the muscular sergeant’s voice calling for fit bodies and world uplift.
O Men, Where Art Thou?
This has been the story of a time when Christianity wanted more muscle and more men. And it is a story relevant for today.
While we may chafe at some of the theology behind Muscular Christianity, many ask the same questions that prompted the movement. In his book Why Men Hate Going to Church, David Murrow cites a Barna study that found women to be
57 percent more likely to participate in adult Sunday school,
54 percent more likely to participate in a small group,
46 percent more likely to disciple others, and
39 percent more likely to have a devotional time or quiet time.52With all of its flaws (many left unmentioned above), what can we learn from the Muscular Christian movement just beginning to decline one century ago?
Reclaim the Body
God’s design for man is as assaulted today as it is underappreciated. Muscular Christianity is an enigma to modern ears, in part, because we have an anemic theology of the body.
We too fail to celebrate raw masculine strength. Anthony Esolen gives us one example, casting men as world-builders:
Every road you see was laid by men. Every house, church, every school, every factory, every public building was raised by the hands of men. You eat with a stainless-steel fork; the iron was mined and the carbon was quarried by men. . . . The whole of your civilization rests upon the shoulders of men who have done work that most people will not do — and that the physically weaker sex could not have done.53
“Dominion over the world, even in the postindustrial West, still needs the strength of men. Good men. Christ’s men.”
Men, despite what our silence on the topic may suggest, are embodied creatures. Our souls remain framed in strength given to cultivate and construct civilization. Dominion over the world, even in the postindustrial West, still needs the strength of men. Good men. Christ’s men.
So while Paul says bodily training is of some value (1 Timothy 4:8), and Muscular Christianity may have posited too much value, we must not think it is of no value. Though the eternal soul takes precedence over the temporal body, the man is never just his soul. Can we wonder long why the world stands confused as to what a man or a woman even is anymore?
Reclaim the Heroic
How many men, especially within the church, view the Christian life as heroic? How many feel the adrenaline pump, the stiff wind of purpose greeting the face and animating them to the helm of life, steering for the harder way?
It may sound counterintuitive, but men retreat instead of rally when trumpets do not sound alarms of war. They grow bored and listless, and they will not easily forfeit their strength on unworthy pursuits. Is what Josiah Strong observed in 1901 untrue?
There is not enough of effort, of struggle, in the typical church life of today to win young men to the church. A flowery bed of ease does not appeal to a fellow who has any manhood in him. The prevailing religion is too comfortable to attract young men who love the heroic.54
“Jesus looks at young men and promises them discomfort, sacrifice, and death. Minimize this call and you forfeit men.”
Jesus looks at young men and promises them discomfort, sacrifice, and death. Minimize this call and you forfeit men. God made me for this. Muscular Christianity attempted to awaken the daring in men. They knew that if you “promise young men battles instead of feasts, swords instead of prizes, campaigns instead of comforts . . . the heroic which lies deep in every man will leap in response.”55
Without losing the gospel or the focus on Jesus Christ and the immortal soul, the Christian religion must never lose its genre as epic. We live in a greater story than we find in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Star Wars or Gladiator. “To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7).
Reclaim the Hero
Muscular Christianity worked tirelessly to rescue the one-sided image of Christ. The gentle Lamb often brings little resistance, but what of the “lion . . . marked by traits like justice, boldness, power, and self-mastery . . . Jesus the carpenter, the desert camper, the whip-cracker”?56
Many men today have refused to follow Jesus not because they have seen “the man Christ Jesus” himself (1 Timothy 2:5) and turned away from his summons. They have turned from the soft-to-touch, cuddle-up-in-green-pastures, silky-hair-and-whispering parody. True — he does lay his sheep down in green pastures; he does lead them beside still waters. But he can do both because his rod and his staff comfort us (Psalm 23:4). Sheep do not feel safe to lie down where their shepherd cannot defend them from wolves. Jesus is worshiped as Lamb because he ever lives as Lion.
“Men must see the Jesus of the Scriptures, not the sentimentalized substitute.”
Men must see the Jesus of the Scriptures, not the sentimentalized substitute. They must see the Commander of the Lord’s armies, the Lord of lords, the Master, the Ruler of the kings on earth, the Son of Man, the Alpha and Omega, the man of war, the Son of the Most High God. The one who did not have his life taken from him but lays it down of his own accord; the one who wields the scepter and wears the crown; the one to whom all must swear fealty, bowing and kissing his ring; the Hero of the story who commands all men everywhere to repentance and faith, for he has fixed a day to judge the world (Acts 17:30–31).
This is the King of kings, who invites us, even men, to follow him and reign with him, forever.
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Indulge, Diet, Repeat: Breaking the Cycle of Overeating
As any discerning Christian knows, sin doesn’t stay outside — it gets into the house. Sexual immortality creeps into the bedroom and must be fled (1 Corinthians 6:18). Sluggishness slumps on the couch and must be starved to death by mission and meaning (Colossians 3:23–24). Slander and grumbling air through our vents and must be forced out by prayer and praise (Philippians 4:4–6). And one of the most subtle sins walks in through the door and sits at your table: gluttony.
Some of us may associate the word gluttony only with morbid obesity. But as a pastor of a young, relatively fit church, I would not only say that I have known the sin of gluttony, but I would estimate that nearly half of our members would say they struggle with habitual overeating, excessive dieting, food obsession, or another food-related issue. Forms of gluttony can tempt both men and women, whether obese or thin, sedentary or active.
Indulge, Restrict, Repeat
To be clear, when I talk about gluttony, I’m not talking about having a second (or third) helping at a party, or during a holiday celebration, or while hosting close friends for dinner. Jesus’s ministry began with a feast (John 2:1–12), and history will be consummated with a feast (Revelation 19:7–10). Throughout redemptive history, God has invited (and commanded) his people to regularly and rejoicingly feast.
When I use the word gluttony, I’m talking about overeating, not because it’s a feast, but because it’s Friday — or because of any other reason among the many we use to justify our extra helpings.
Many of us begin the day with fresh resolve to “eat better,” only to find ourselves reaching for something we shouldn’t — a kind of forbidden fruit — within mere hours. We have another bite, another piece, another portion, and immediately following the deliciousness comes the bitter aftertaste of shame and regret. From here, we may starve these feelings with redoubled efforts to restrict again (“My diet starts tomorrow”), or we may comfort them with more food. By the end of the night, we go to bed bloated, but deflated; stuffed, but far from satisfied.
“What if the problem isn’t that we enjoy food too much, but far, far too little?”
Those familiar with this pattern may be tempted to think they enjoy food — or at least certain foods — too much. But what if the problem isn’t that we enjoy food too much, but far, far too little?
Decade of Dieting
I know the cycle well. Since high school football, I’ve counted calories, cut carbs, and codified more personal food laws than the Torah has commandments. I have declared foods that are free of fat, sugar, gluten, dairy, and cholesterol as “clean,” and foods that contain high amounts of salt, sugar, fat, carbs, or preservatives as “unclean” — or at least as “bad.”
Countless mornings, I set out with fresh resolve to restrict what would enter my body, and if I transgressed any of my food laws, I felt guilt, shame, and regret. This was classic legalism, and it led to where all legalism leads: “down a path of grinding effort, at the end of which there is no God — only insecurities, mental anguish, and more labor,” as Knute Larson puts it, commenting on 1 Timothy 4:3 (HNTC, 1 Thessalonians–Philemon, 204).
As I have worked through my own sinful relationship with food, and as I have now walked with many down the same path, I’ve learned that deep down, beneath the calorie-tracking apps and diet attempts, beneath the fear of being fat, even beneath the desperate desire to gain control of life by controlling our diet, at the bedrock of our food issues is a vision of God — a severely malnourished one.
To Those Who Restrict
Judging by the size of the diet industry (now valued at around $200 billion a year), many of us are well acquainted with dieting. Go to any gathering with food, and surely someone will not partake because he or she is currently cutting the item being offered. To be sure, much dieting can be good and healthy. But as Tilly Dillehay argues in her superb book Broken Bread, our tendency to excessively diet often comes from a form of asceticism, which she defines as the “belief that God is stingy as we are.” Such a view of God leads us to distrust anything that is “too enjoyable, too luxurious, too free, too unstructured” (13).
For those of us who feel a constant need to diet, we can have a hard time believing that “food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do” (1 Corinthians 8:8). We struggle to receive the good news that Jesus declared all foods morally clean (Mark 7:19), and that “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:4–5). Instead, like Peter, we can find our identity in our refusal to eat foods we have deemed unclean (Acts 10:14).
We are, in J.I. Packer’s words, “too proud to enjoy the enjoyable” (“How I Learned to Live Joyfully”). And oddly, our inability to enjoy the enjoyable often leads us to the sin of gluttony.
To Those Who Indulge
Dillehay describes gluttony as a “kind of tastelessness” that doesn’t really enjoy the first bite, and so keeps eating more and more in an effort to grasp the missing pleasure (40, 44). In other words, the reason we must have another bite is because we didn’t fully enjoy the one before it. She continues:
Perhaps it’s not that pie got ahold of you, but that you never properly got ahold of pie. It’s that, perhaps, you never learned to think of life as waves coming toward you directly from God, waves that you must embrace as they come and then put behind you, readying yourself for the next wave. Waves cannot be repeated at will. Neither can the first bite of pie. (42)
“The best way to overcome overeating is to eat — slowly, mindfully, worshipfully.”
And there’s the breakthrough: gluttony reflects not an excessive enjoyment of food, but a deficient enjoyment of food as God’s gift — and of God as the giver. When you binge, the problem isn’t that you’re enjoying what you’re eating too much; the problem is that you’re not enjoying God in and through what you’re eating, and therefore you must have another bite.
For ten years, I thought the way to overcome overeating was to redouble my efforts to restrict. Surprisingly, I’ve learned that the best way to overcome overeating is to eat — slowly, mindfully, worshipfully.
Eating in God’s Presence
Practically, this means put the food on a plate. Sit down. Put your phone away and turn the TV off. And pray. Before you eat, let your eyes look to God, for the food has come from him (Psalm 145:15).
Then, as you relish the contours of texture and manifold layers of flavor, praise him from whom all blessings flow. As you sit and savor, remember what Edwards taught us: the greatest earthly gifts, food included, “are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean” (Works, 2:244).
Freedom from both over-restriction and over-indulgence comes from focusing not on what we eat, but on how we eat — enjoying God in every bite. Again, Dillehay helps us here:
The true answer to gluttony has much more in common with feasting than with dieting. . . . It is becoming more and more a child who receives, and less and less a parent who withholds (from ourselves and those around us). It is sitting quietly and with full presence of mind, glorying in tastes that were created by a good God, instead of fearing and distrusting tastes that were made too good by a good God. The answer to gluttony is knowing when enough is enough, learning the feel of a wave passing, and growing in the wisdom that looks to the next wave from God with satisfaction, contentment, and readiness. (50–51)
Come and Eat
Many of us make food laws, break those food laws, feel immediate guilt, shame, and regret, and then either starve those emotions with redoubled restriction and dieting, or comfort those emotions with food. If we continue down this path, the end result will be hunger — physical and spiritual.
Freedom will come not only in learning how to fast, but in learning how to truly feast (Isaiah 55:1–3). As Michelle Stacey writes, “The true cure for our dietary sins may lie in an almost opposite direction to that prescribed by the nutrition cognoscenti: not in claiming more control, but less; not in taking power away from food, but giving it back; not in fear of death, but in love of life” (Consumed, 206).
If dieting has become a way of life, and overeating has become routine, God is inviting you to slow down and feast — for “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof” (1 Corinthians 10:26). Slowly, mindfully, worshipfully eat, enjoying the goodness of God in every bite. Jesus, the bread of life (John 6:35) and living water (John 4:10), won’t only fill your stomach; he will satisfy your soul.