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When I was a student in college, a Christian writer and speaker that I admired visited our campus on a lecture tour. A young believer at the time, I had been greatly influenced by one of her books. She was the kind of person I aspired to be. A writer, speaker, and a serious Christian. After she spoke to our student group, several of us took her to lunch, where I was thrilled to get a seat at her right hand. I didn’t elbow anybody out of the way for the privilege, at least not much. I didn’t want to miss a word. I don’t remember much of what this famous author said duringlunch. What I do recall is being puzzled by her tone. She didn’t seem to be nearlyas excited to meet us as we were to meet her. Maybe she was tired from her longtravel schedule. Perhaps she was coming down with something. For whateverreason, most of her comments to us were terse, almost impatient. If you hadforced me to put a name to her mood, I would have said that she was grumpy. Butof course, that couldn’t be true. Here was a person who had written severalno-nonsense books about discipleship and the Christian life. She was famous forher faith. Her spiritual lineage qualified her as Christian royalty. I was sureit was only my imagination. When the visit was over, some of us asked the staff worker whohad picked her up from the airport what it was like to spend time with sodistinguished and spiritual a person. The staff worker was silent for a moment.Then she said, “Well, all I will say about it is that sometimes you need toallow your heroes to have clay feet.” I remember being troubled by her answer.I didn’t like what it seemed to imply about one of my heroes in the faith. These days heroes are hard to come by. These days heroes are hard to come by. We have galaxies of stars, swarms of celebrities, and an abundance of influencers. But bonafide, pedestal-standing heroes are in short supply. It is hard to find heroes in an iconoclastic age. We love to tear down the idols of earlier generations. Once, we built monuments for our heroes and wrote biographies in their praise. Now we would rather expose flaws than laud virtues. The histories we write today reconstruct those old narratives using a wrecking ball. The new standard leaves no room for moral ambiguity or the limitations of cultural context.In the church, we used to call our spiritual heroes saints.But Protestantism divested itself of most of those champions of old during theReformation. The Reformers did not deny the existence of people with remarkablefaith and exemplary lives. But they did object to the way the church hadexaggerated their accomplishments and elevated them, as Calvin put it, “intocopartnership with God, to be honored, and also to be invoked and praised inHis stead.”But our greatest problem is that our heroes always turn outto have feet of clay, no matter how good they appear from a distance. Someyears ago, I took a class with a professor who was famous for his books onspiritual formation. More than one person told me that he was the mostChristlike person they had ever met. During one of our class sessions, thisprofessor told us that ordinary Christians could live the same kind of lifethat Jesus did. I was troubled by his assertion and asked him if he thoughtthat his life met that standard. “I’m not going to answer your question,”
John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon.
Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for Today in the Word and a monthly column on prayer for Mature Living. He is the author of 16 books. His latest book , When God is Silent, is published by Lexham Press. You can learn more about John at https://www.johnkoessler.com.
