The Performance of Grace

Some Musings on the Protestant Work Ethic

“I don’t drink, and I don’t chew, and I don’t go with girls who do.”

It’s a rather silly little rhyme, but I think it captures something about American Protestantism that I’ve found increasingly difficult to ignore. Somewhere along the way, we’ve managed to confuse the appearance of holiness with holiness itself.

Now, this isn’t exactly a novel observation. Some of Protestantism’s most celebrated preachers, men like Martyn Lloyd-Jones, spent considerable time warning against precisely this sort of externalism. Attending church, abstaining from certain sins, and maintaining a respectable life don’t make a man a Christian. Fair enough. But what happens after we’ve sufficiently condemned all this outward performance? We turn inward, examining our affections, our repentance, our sincerity, and our love for Christ. And suddenly we’ve developed an entirely new vocabulary for demonstrating how genuinely regenerate we are. We’ve even learned how to perform humility. Quite an accomplishment for people who insist they contribute nothing to their salvation.

Of course, the Calvinist will object that these things are merely the evidence of regeneration, not its cause. I understand the distinction. I once defended it myself. But that doesn’t eliminate the problem. It simply moves it. Once we’ve established what genuine Christianity looks like, we’ve also established what it can be made to look like. The performance hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply become more sophisticated.

Max Weber famously connected the Protestant work ethic with the development of capitalism, observing how the anxiety surrounding election could encourage disciplined labor and worldly productivity. There is something rather ironic about a theology that insists man can do nothing to secure his salvation while producing a culture in which man seems perpetually occupied with demonstrating that he possesses it. We become extraordinarily industrious people, building businesses, schools, churches, and institutions. But I find myself wondering whether we’ve confused productivity with faithfulness. We can build an awful lot of things. But can we build anything that lasts?

And by lasting, I don’t mean merely surviving as a name on a wall. A university can stand for centuries while repudiating everything its founders believed. A business can survive three generations and become something its founder wouldn’t recognize. A charity can retain its endowment while forgetting the very purpose for which it was established. We build things that outlast us, but not necessarily purposes that bind those who come after us. We confuse survival with fidelity.

Consider the Puritans, whom certain modern postmillennialists seem particularly fond of romanticizing. We’re told these were men who thought generationally, who built institutions for their grandchildren, who understood that Christianity was supposed to shape civilizations. And certainly, many of them did. Though I suspect we’re occasionally guilty of reading our modern eschatological systems backward into their history. But let’s grant the argument. They built for posterity. Wonderful. What happened to what they built? Harvard abandoned its original religious commitments. New England Congregationalism fractured, and Unitarianism flourished. The broader Protestant world eventually produced increasingly divergent understandings of Christian doctrine and morality. If we’re going to admire the fruits of their labor, shouldn’t we at least examine the harvest?

Now, I’m not suggesting the Puritans are personally responsible for every theological absurdity their descendants entertained. Arius was a presbyter, but that hardly makes Arianism the responsibility of the apostles. I’m not handing out historical report cards. My question is rather more fundamental. What principle of continuity obligates the next generation to preserve what the previous generation received? The Puritan believed he was justified in correcting the Christianity he inherited. Why shouldn’t his grandson believe himself equally justified in correcting the Puritan? Both can appeal to Scripture. Both can insist they’re simply being faithful to God’s Word. And both can accuse the other of abandoning biblical Christianity.

This is what I find particularly amusing about the whole arrangement. We congratulate ourselves for thinking generationally while maintaining an ecclesiology that can make every generation its own theological starting point. Grandpa spends his life building a church, and his grandson reads the same Bible and decides Grandpa got it wrong. Then the great-grandson does the same thing. The family sells the firm. The college rewrites its mission. The charity forgets why it was started. And somehow we’re supposed to regard this as evidence of a civilization-building religious tradition. We’ve become extraordinarily proficient at building things for our grandchildren while handing them the tools to dismantle everything we’ve built.

This isn’t merely a church problem. It’s a problem with how we understand inheritance, authority, obligation, and the common good. An individual can be extraordinarily industrious without having any account of why his successors should remain faithful to his purposes. A society can celebrate the freedom to redefine everything and then act surprised when nothing stays put.

And perhaps this is where my growing appreciation for Orthodoxy has most significantly changed how I think about Christianity. The Christian life isn’t fundamentally an individual project of establishing the authenticity of my regeneration, nor is the Church an institution I’m commissioned to reinvent according to my understanding of Scripture. I belong to something I didn’t create. I receive a faith I have no authority to reconstruct. My salvation isn’t an isolated exercise in spiritual introspection, but participation in the life of Christ within His Church. There is a hierarchy, a communion, and an inheritance that doesn’t begin with me and won’t end when I’m dead.

That changes how I think about everything else: family, work, education, and what I leave behind. The point isn’t merely to hand my grandchildren a building, a bank account, or a familiar name. It’s to hand them something worth receiving, and a reason not to destroy it.

Perhaps the great irony of the Protestant work ethic is that we’ve become so preoccupied with building things for Christ that we’ve forgotten Christ already built a Church.

And perhaps the larger tragedy is that we’ve learned to build an empire without explaining why our grandchildren shouldn’t dismantle it.