In a previous post I introduced the book by British pastor J.B. Phillips “Your God Is Too Small.” For the next several weeks on Tuesdays I will highlight one of the false views of God explained in Phillips’ book. This week’s category is Meek-And-Mild:
Why “MILD”? Of all the epithets that could be applied to Christ, this seems one of the least appropriate. For what does “mild,” as applied to a person, conjure up to our minds? Surely a picture of someone who wouldn’t say “boo” to the proverbial goose; someone who would let sleeping dogs lie and avoid trouble wherever possible; someone of a placid temperament who is almost a stranger to the passions of red-blooded humanity; someone who is a bit of a nonentity, both uninspired and uninspiring.
This word “mild” is apparently deliberately used to describe a man who did not hesitate to challenge and expose the hypocrisies of the religious people of his day: a man who had such “personality” that He walked unscathed through a murderous crowd; a man so far from being a nonentity that He was regarded by the authorities as a public danger; a man who could be moved to violent anger by shameless exploitation or by smug complacent orthodoxy; a man of such courage that He deliberately walked to what He knew would mean death, despite the earnest pleas of well-meaning friends! Mild! What a word to use for a personality whose challenge and strange attractiveness nineteen centuries have by no means exhausted. Jesus Christ might well be called “meek,” in the sense of being selfless and humble and utterly devoted to what He considered right, whatever the personal cost; but “mild,” never!
Yet it is this fatal combination of “meek and mild” which has been so often, and is even now, applied to Him. We can hardly be surprised if children feel fairly soon that they have outgrown the “tender Shepherd” and find their heroes elsewhere.
But if the impression of a soft and sentimental Jesus has been made (supported, alas, all to often by sugary hymns and pretty religious pictures), the harm is not over when the adolescent rejects the soft and childish conception. There will probably linger at the back of his mind an idea that Christ and the Christian religion is a soft and sentimental thing which has nothing to do with the workaday world. For there is no doubt that this particular “inadequate god,” the mild and soft and sentimental, still exists in many adult minds. Indeed the very word “Jesus” conjures up to many people a certain embarrassing sweet tenderness (which incidentally could easily be put in its proper place by an intelligentadult reading of the Gospels).
The appeal of this sickly-sweet figure, or of those whose methods are founded on such a concept, is rightly regarded by normal people as “below the belt.” But in fact there is no connection between what has been rudely called the “creeping-Jesus” method and the life and character of the real Christ. The real beauty, love, and tenderness of Christ’s character are not, of course, being denied or minimized, but when one characteristic is caricatured at the expense of all the others, we get a grotesque distortion which can only appeal to the morbidly sentimental.
The danger of the “meek-and-mild” idea is two-fold. First, since Christians believe that the character of Christ is an accurate depiction in time and space of the character of the Eternal Deity, it is apt to lead to a conception of God that is woolly and sentimental. We shall have more to say of this in a later chapter, and we will merely point out here the impossibility of a mature adult’s feeling constrained to worship a god whose emotional equipment is less developed than his own. The second danger is that since it is axiomatic with Christians that God is love, this most terrible and beautiful of all the virtues becomes debased and cheapened.
