Love, sin, and "The Road Less Traveled"

One of the top five books which have changed my life is M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. And perhaps the part of the book which has most profoundly changed my thinking is his approach to love and sin.

Having grown up Southern Baptist, I had always thought of sin as a specific, wrong act (e.g., stealing, gambling, drinking). A corollary of this belief was for me to think of Christianity as two sets of checklists kept by God, our good acts and bad acts, like Santa's list of who's been naughty and nice.

Now, we also believed that if you were "saved," by which we meant you had "accepted Christ" in a Southern Baptist church and been baptized, you were definitely going to heaven. (We believed that Southern Baptists were admitted to heaven automatically; members of other Christian denominations were admitted only on a case by case basis. Members of denominations that allowed drinking were highly suspect.) Conversely, you weren't saved just because you were a good person or had done a bunch of good deeds -- that wasn't enough ("For by grace are ye saved through faith . . . not of works lest any man should boast" - Eph. 2:8,9). So since whether you were saved was the sole criteria for getting into heaven, not the checklists, I wasn't clear on why God had to keep the checklists, but I was clear that that the checklists were being kept. I so equated sin with specific bad acts that, as a child, I believed that crying was a sin, and when I was about seven years old, I told my mother that it wasn't fair that I could never be perfect the way Jesus was because I had cried as a baby.

Peck starts with a definition of love. "Love" is when you want someone to be all that they can be, for themselves and for the glory of God. "Sin" is anything that is outside of God's plan for a person or that keeps one from becoming all that God had planned for him or her. And as you think about that, you can see what a dramatic shift of emphasis that is, with repercussions in the way one view's oneself, the people one comes in contact with, and especially one's faith.

If you are told from your earliest years, as I was, that Jesus died for your sins, and you are also taught that a "sin" is a specific bad act, this becomes in your mind, "Jesus died because I didn't obey my parents today." (Like the faux children's book title, Daddy Drinks Because You Cry.) On the other hand, if you understand that sin is anything that separates you from God's will for your life, you can understand that same statement, "Jesus died for your sins," not as your fault, but as a sacrificial act to help you live the "abundant" life that God wants for you.

Likewise, these definitions change the way we interpret the passage from Paul, "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" -- it's not that we've all done specific bad acts that God is holding against us, but rather that we've all failed to claim, again, the "abundant" life that God has planned for us.

Peck's definition of "love" is opposed to the popular usage definition of love as emotional fondness. With Peck's definition of "love," it becomes clear that while we may not like everyone we meet -- and I would argue that I don't have control over who I like -- we can, and are commanded to, love everyone we meet. That is, we can assist and facilitate those in our lives to become the most that they can be in their lives, for themselves and for the glory of God. I can't choose to like someone (though I can choose to focus on the positive characteristics and not dwell on the negative ones), but I can choose to love the person.

This is the key to understanding Mark 2:27, the story of when Jesus and his disciples were picking corn on the sabbath because they were hungry, and they were reprimanded by the Pharisees, to which Jesus responded, "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath." God's laws were made for us for our benefit, not as an arbitrary standard against which our lives are to be judged harshly, but rather as advice given for our own benefit, which we disregard at our own peril.

It is in this context, and this context only, which I can say abortion is a sin, NOT because it is something which God will hold against the mother and father, but rather, because I don't believe abortion is a part of God's plan for anyone's life. As my favorite preacher John Claypool says, "Life is gift, and birth is windfall." I believe that the opportunity to bring another life into the world is an occasion for joy, and that even the most poorly-timed pregnancy may end up being a blessing. (And not to be flippant, but the time to exercise "choice" was whether to have sex, and not after the fact, in an attempt to eliminate the consequences of your previous bad choice.)

Of course, it's easy for me to say that. I'm an upper-middle class, single male, for whom an unplanned pregnancy is not a part of my likely future, and should one occur, I would be reasonably able to cope with it, both emotionally and financially. I have little tolerance for Christian conservatives who work hard to keep condoms out of schools and to make abortion against the law, and I'm repulsed by those idiots who keep repeating the specious Focus on the Family-circulated talking point about how someone's daughter has to get permission to take an aspirin in school but can get an abortion without letting her parents know. For the most part, these are not the people who are most at-risk for teenage pregnancy and teenage abortion, though, of course, these things happen within all segments of the population.

Let's be clear: the girls who are most likely to have early unprotected sex are often the same girls who come from troubled homes, and by troubled homes, I don't mean they don't get the latest shoes, I mean they get smacked around by their mothers and step-fathers. It's important to prosecute these abusive parents, but successful prosecutions are difficult -- the girl may be the only witness, and being from this background, she probably lies a lot, so she's not going to be particularly credible. At the very least, a safe abortion for the troubled teen -- without having to go and ask permission from the abusive parent who is the very reason the girl wants the abortion in the first place -- must remain on the table.

I touch on this topic with trepidation. I'm not sure what we need is more religious nuts preaching on sexual morality; we seem to have our quota of that already. By the same token, we don't have enough people saying they are sympathetic to the moral questions raised by the easy availability of abortion, and yet believe it is important that abortion remain legal, safe, and locally available.

My favorite version of the story of the guy who gets lost and stops to ask a local for directions goes like this: Guy gets lost, come up on service station, goes inside, and asks how to get to his destination. Service station guy responds, "Well, you wouldn't want to start from here." We find ourselves in that position all. the. time. We make mistakes, and in our attempts to correct the mistake (or, more often, merely to escape the negative consequences of our mistakes), we have to make judgment calls between several less-than-optimal courses of action. We create our own messes, make tough choices to save our own hides, and then have to live with the consequences of our decisions for the rest of our lives. I've never had to make a decision regarding an unplanned pregnancy, and I have my ideas about what I think I would do, but I can't, and wouldn't, impose my decision making process on others, any more than I would impose my religious beliefs on others.

Sometimes it seems that God gave humanity "free will" in the beginning, and ever since, conservatives have been trying to take it away. (Unless, of course, you translate it to French, ("laissez-faire"), and apply it to economics.) Part of free will is the freedom to make bad choices, and part of the grace of God is the opportunity to grow as a person in the aftermath of a bad choice. Conservatives prefer a static universe, where the power to screw up our lives (especially by drugs and sex, which conservatives seem fixated on) is taken away, but God has never shared that preference.