Human beings are morally fragile creatures, prone to every delusion under the sun, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the celebrity cults that dominate life in the modern world, including the modern church. Back in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality associated with Joseph Stalin. In the West we have our own cults of personality, usually associated with sporting heroes and pop and movie stars. Nor is the church immune from this kind of attitude and practice; and in fact, it has never been immune. The church at Corinth failed to see the full significance of the cross, and took pride in Christian preachers. One group declared: ‘I follow Paul’, while others proclaimed: ‘I follow Apollos’ or ‘I follow Cephas’. ‘I follow Christ’ may be Paul’s own corrective, or it may be the slogan of what was perhaps the most pretentious group. In any case, Paul replies with some vigour: ‘Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?’ (see 1 Cor.1:12-13) People who profess the Christian faith can follow faithful leaders in a way that borders on idolatry.
Yet in the same letter, even in the same section (1 Cor.1-4), Paul can write: ‘I urge you, then, be imitators of me’ (1 Cor.4:16). At first, it might appear to be a contradiction: we are not to follow Paul, yet in a sense we are to follow Paul. A little later, he repeats and expands on this: ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ’ (1 Cor. 11:1). In the quaint words of Cotton Mather: ‘Examples do strangely charm us into imitation.’ How can this apostle, who says that nothing good dwells in him (Rom.7:18) and that he is the chief of sinners (1 Tim.1:15), tell Christians to imitate him? It seems that Christians need to distinguish what is an unhealthy celebrity cult and what is a healthy following of a suitable model or example. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once confessed that he was something of a hero worshipper. Yet in his Lectures to My Students, Charles Spurgeon warned that ‘Hero-worship is a kind of idolatry, and must not be encouraged’.
In discussing the gospel claims with Muslims, it is very common to hear the Islamic objection that Christian saints in the Bible are not always saintly. To the Muslim, all the prophets – all 124,000 of them! – are sinless. Hence one hears the objection, as I have heard repeatedly: ‘Why is the story of Lot in the Bible? It does not edify.’ My reply is: ‘Because it is true, and so, when rightly understood, it instructs.’
This leaves us with the question of how we are to distinguish between an unhealthy kind of hero worship and a helpful kind of following good examples. One of the wonderful things about Scripture is that the continued study of it should provide us with a correcting mechanism for our thoughts and practices. It is meant to rebuke and correct us (2 Tim.3:16), and as we read it and hear it, we are challenged to confront the weaknesses in our own lives. We may be prone to hero worship, and then Scripture reminds us that the greatest saints are flawed. We may be prone to be too censorious, and then Scripture tells us to take out the plank in our own eye, and to imitate those who are more mature than we are in the faith (Heb.13:7).
The book of Ecclesiastes is, in many ways, one long discourse on the results of Genesis 3. Everything under the sun is vanity, a vapor, or meaningless. Noah trusts God, obeys His Word, takes 120 years to build an ark, is ridiculed by friends and neighbours, and is used to save the world – then gets drunk. The same pattern can be found elsewhere, notably in the book of Judges. Even in the life of David, the man after God’s own heart, there is the appalling blot of adultery, sin denied, murder by proxy, and deception. How low are we capable of sinking?
Yet the answer to the world’s sin is not an overdose of cynicism. Grace does transform sinners, and we do learn by example. When Augustine was pressed to help his fellow preachers who lacked his sanctity and gifts, he replied that those who aspired to the pulpit might learn more from seeing him in action than by reading what he had dictated. There is much to this, although it is not altogether helpful to those of us who live nearly 1600 years after the death of the great man. It is, however, an illustration of the fact that the Bible teaches by precepts and by example. There are commandments, and then there are accounts of those who keep those commandments (e.g. David showing mercy in 1 Samuel 24 and 26) or flouting those commandments (e.g. the same David committing adultery in 2 Samuel 11). If one needs any convincing of the depravity of liberal theology, read Hannah Tillich’s memoirs of her husband, Paul Tillich; if one needs to be uplifted by the beauty of holiness, read Andrew Bonar’s memoirs of his friend, Robert Murray M’Cheyne. None of us needs a false hero, but all of us can grow by imitating good models.
With warmest regards in Christ,
Peter Barnes