Should Christians Be Nicer?
Should Christians be nicer than non-Christians? Shouldn’t the Holy Spirit be turning Christians into humans who are nicer than their unbelieving friends and neighbors? The obvious answer is yes, yet our experience shows case after case in which non-Christians act with more kindness toward their neighbors than Christians do. Why is this?
C. S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity that it’s all relative. Take, for example, the rude Christian lady you know. Most likely, she started with a negative balance of niceness and the Holy Spirit has helped her to love her neighbor more than if the Holy Spirit had never dwelt in her heart. But based on where she started, she’s only just come up to zero, so-to-speak. She’s barely even nice at all. Imagine what she’d be like without the Holy Spirit. Yikes!
On the other hand, that agnostic coworker you have who is “the nicest guy” was born with a positive balance of niceness. So even with none of the heart-changing work of the Holy Spirit, your non-believing coworker is already far nicer than the saved Christian lady who grates on your nerves.
Christianity does indeed make Christians nicer, but we make a false comparison if we try to compare one person to another. The only way, Lewis argues, to tell whether Christianity as a religion really makes its people nicer would be to compare how nice a person was before knowing Christ to who they are now in Christ.
I think Lewis has a strong point here, but let’s explore another reason Christians don’t appear to be as nice as we think they should be: disagreement about what is true.
What does it mean to be nice?
This is a more troublesome question than it appears. It’s one ethicists have been grappling with for millennia, actually. Today, this question rears its head in hot-button scenarios like America’s southern border. Is it kinder to open the border and let immigrants, legal and illegal, simply stream across? Or is it kinder to enter immigrants into a system which processes their claims for refugee status so that they can eventually become citizens? These questions only lead to other questions like, “Who do we have a responsibility to be kind to—American citizens or immigrants?” and “Can we show kindness toward both?”
Or, there’s the abortion question. What is the best way for Christians to show kindness here? Is it nicer to make abortion illegal while we fund, staff, and supply pregnancy resource centers? Or is it nicer to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare?” Again, more questions arise, such as, “Who do we have more responsibility toward—mothers or their unborn children?” and “Is there a way to show love to both?”
What about gender and sexuality issues? Would a Christian love her neighbor better by being part of an affirming church, or calling her LGBTQ neighbors to repentance for their lifestyle and healing in the gospel? Oy. My brain and heart hurt as I watch the questions pile up. I’m sure yours do, too.
These are tough issues, and well-intentioned Christians disagree about what is true in these scenarios, never mind what the non-Christian world believes to be true. The key is, this question of how can a Christian best show kindness in the world absolutely hinges upon what we all believe the facts are.
There is no way to decide how to love our neighbor if we haven’t got at least a rudimentary grasp of what the truth is. Who is my neighbor? What are her needs, and how can I meet them? What is right and wrong in this situation? We can’t agree on what is kind without a least a basic agreement on what is true.
But how do we find the truth in these hard, hard questions? The answer is simple: sola scriptura.
“Huh?” you say. Many of the readers here at TGT may not remember or know, but there were five crucial statements of faith that came out of the Protestant Reformation, begun in 1517 when the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, nailed 95 theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. These were:
- Sola gratia
- Sola fide
- Sola Christus
- Sola scriptura
- Sola deo gloria
The Reformation taught that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, by Christ alone, which we can know about through Scripture alone. And to God alone belongs the glory for all of this work. Or, as my confirmation verse, Ephesians 2:8-9 puts it so succinctly, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (ESV).
Scripture is the key to the knowledge of what is good, true, and beautiful in this life and the next. Scripture is how God talks to us, if we would only open our ears.
Why do we believe what we believe? Because God said it in the Scriptures. Without the Scriptures, we are lost, literally and forever. When we let other voices (culture, preachers, books) crowd out the Scriptures, we dilute or even lose the truth. If we are not reading the Scriptures constantly, we cannot know what is true, let alone how we can best show kindness to others in this life.
God does all the work to save us miserable sinners. Regardless of how nice we are, it is Christ’s work, and only his work, that we stake our salvation upon. And the only reason we have this faith is because God gifts us with it and sustains it. All the glory is God’s. None is our own. Our righteousness is as filthy rags, says Isaiah, and will continue to be so until Christ comes again and God makes the earth anew. Until then, all we can do is simply repent of our unkindness and believe—and read our Bibles.
is a homeschooling mom of five and proud Navy wife. She works hard to be what Chesterton called a “Jill-of-all-trades,” chronically trying new projects for the sheer joy of exploration. She’s addicted to coffee, enjoys dark beer, and loves to be in the mountains. You can find her on Instagram @rhikutzer.
Photograph © Fa Barboza, used with permission
