When humility is an evasion and grace is an excuse

God's greatest gifts can become curses and His highest virtues can become vices.  So it is with grace and humility.

Before I say what I am going to say let me say what I need to say about my love for grace and appreciation for humility.  I am a card carrying member and chapter president of the Sonship cult, a ministry of World Harvest Mission which emphasizes grace as our means of justification, sanctification and everything else in the Christian life.  When I learned that grace brings sanctification as well as justification it changed everything for me and it truly humbled me from my prideful legalistic ways.  It seems clear to me that humility is the cardinal virtue that would flow from the gift of grace.

Yet, as I say, the human heart has a way of twisting even the best that God gives.  As I say this I am reminded of Father Brown from the Father Brown detective stories by G. K. Chesterton.  In one of the books Father Brown says that the reason he is so successful in solving cases is that he puts himself in the place of the criminal and just imagines what he would do himself.  In this case I'll go Father Brown one better and say I don't have to imagine what the criminal will do, I know what he'll do because I am the criminal.

What brought all of this on was some reading I was doing today in the book Bonds that Make Us Free by C. Terry Warner.  This thing nailed me to the wall so strongly that I am having to laugh at myself.  Here's the passage:

When we are caught up in self-betrayal, "admitting" we are unworthy is just one more strategy in our repertoire. It gives us just as good a justification for acting irresponsibly as the strategy of condemning others.  It is a powerful maneuver because claiming to be a victim of our make-up or nature is even harder to refute than claiming to be a victim of others. (To call it mistaken seems like telling terminally ill patients they are exaggerating their illness.)

The maneuver is powerful for another reason. We think we are being honest, that we are "admitting the truth at last."  If we were living a lie before, then surely, we think, we are telling the truth now. Indeed, we can say that although we may not be the wondrous individuals we have made ourselves out to be, we at least are not being hypocrites anymore.  We believe we have mustered up the courage to be honest with ourselves.  But the truth is, we are taking this position accusingly and self-victimizingly - and therefore with violence in our hearts.  We make people feel guilty for not rescuing us, or for being successful themselves, and thus hold people hostage to our misery.

We have all met breastbeaters who, convinced of their worthlessness, beat themselves up verbally and emotionally.  Breastbeaters are not as purely self-condemning as they look.  Their  is really just another way of playing the victim and nurturing feelings of self-justification. Nietzsche wrote: "When we despise ourselves, we love the despiser in ourselves."

I don't know if I am guilty of every single thing in this passage, but then again maybe I am, maybe I'm just deceiving myself ;-)  But I do know that I have often used humility and grace as an excuse and as a red-herring.  Being humble and self-deprecating is a great means of side-stepping criticism.  If I can criticize myself to you I can head off your criticisms of me if my criticisms of myself are harder or more harsh. Similarly, for me grace has become an excuse for a lack of discipline and all kinds of other things.
Don't get me wrong.  Even if I were to become the most disciplined person in the world I understand that at the end of the day I would only have God's grace to thank for anything I have.  Yet, grace can't be an excuse for irresponsibility and humility is improperly used if it becomes an evasion of responsibility.