Every now and again I hear criticisms of what a person supposes to be Protestant spirituality. It has never once been accurate. That is not to say that there aren’t legitimate criticisms to be made from time to time, just that whenever I hear them the criticisms are 3-4 degrees removed from any actual primary source in Protestantism.
I hesitate to say this, but it it true, that even among scholars I find claims about “Protestantism” or “legal and forensic gospel” or even just “Martin Luther thought” that have no ground in reality. In most cases their criticisms are exactly the sort of things Protestants were always criticizing, and the supposedly “new” insights being advanced were the very things Protestants have always believed.
Even among scholars (we might say, especially among scholars) what is criticized in Protestantism is really just being critical of the church of one’s youth (or, more likely, the bold claims of their former youth pastor). Instead of being grounded in the actual Protestant tradition, folks have a tendency to just project their own experience and church onto the whole of Protestantism (or just Lutheran, Reformed, etc.).
Recently I heard a critique that was less of an argument but more of a jab against Reformed spirituality and the call to preach the gospel to yourself every day. I just wanted to pick that up here because of the clear confusion that this person had, and the ways people might make the same mistakes.
Let me start with his mistake: No tradition within Protestantism has ever said that preaching the gospel to yourself every day was somehow a replacement for being formed in virtue.
There is a false narrative that was popularized in the mid twentieth century that Protestants rejected virtue ethics. There is a long history here, and people smarter and more informed than myself are thankfully working on it, but it is enough to say that this is false. Every major Protestant tradition had a clear account of the formation of virtue that is available by nature, and a parallel (albeit different) account of the formation of virtue by supernature.
Importantly, no one coming out of the Magisterial Reformation believed that nature had become so utterly depraved that there wasn’t a kind of goodness available in the natural ordering of reality. But, of course, the focus wasn’t on developing natural virtue since, as Paul tells us in Romans 14:23, “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” There is such a thing called natural virtue, but it cannot somehow be used as a replacement for holiness, and before the face of God it is revealed to be nothing.
The emphasis of Protestant spirituality, especially thinking here of Luther and Calvin, was on the fact that the gospel has a name and it is Jesus. By faith we embrace Christ, and therefore receive his benefits, and our walking by faith is the continual trust that he is our righteousness and our sanctification.
But the idea that this spirituality leads to a kind of spirituality where we are looking at ourselves in the mirror telling ourselves the gospel because we don’t really believe it, is a massive twisting of what we find in the tradition.
But even this assumption is just a marginal mistake. The deeper mistake comes from what we can hear when someone talks about “preaching the gospel to yourself.”
Certainly, the fact that we have to preach the gospel to ourselves daily is an obvious fact of reality. But it is the word “preaching” here that we need to be cautious about.
One might imagine a person who is captivated by other things just shouting facts into the void in their soul while they wonder why it doesn’t shape their lives. This isn’t what “preaching the gospel to yourself” is.
To preach the gospel to yourself is to pause, frame your life in the presence of the holy God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and come before the whirlwind like Job. Preaching the gospel to yourself is recognizing that this God determines your life. No other question is of the same weight as who this God is and what he has declared.
Before this Whirlwind we come to know that he has not left us alone, but has drawn near to us in Christ Jesus. Out of his steadfast love and mercy (praise God for the riches of Psalm 25) he draws near to us, not because of our sophistication and savvy, but because his mercy if “from of old.” On the ground of his own love he draws near and calls us to himself.
We preach the gospel to ourselves every day because we are a people inclined to wander, to create “self-made religion” (Col. 2), and to try to “begin in the Spirit while advancing ourselves in the flesh” (Gal. 3:3). Every day we do this, not because we have found a mantra we can use, but because we have found a God who has not remained distant.
We preach the gospel to ourselves because, as William Bridge reminds us, our conscience understands law but not the atonement.
We preach the gospel to ourselves because, as Luther would often remind, Satan is the accuser.
We preach the gospel to ourselves because, as Edwards would remind us, we cannot force ourselves off of the things of this world, we need to see something better to know a deeper and more profound beauty.
To preach the gospel to ourselves is not self-talk. It is stepping into our experiences, failures, struggles, and the ebb and flow of our lives to shepherd ourselves to the one in whom we hope. Preaching the gospel to ourselves is ordering our lives Christward, trusting that true formation is only ever before his face. In preaching the gospel to ourselves we draw near to the God of the gospel in the truth of our lives to know as we have been known.
I have a prior post on this you can find here, along with a sermon I gave on this topic.
For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about this feature of Protestant spirituality, what we tend to miss about it, and why it is so fundamental to the growth of grace. See that video below.
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