Failure in the Christian Life

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning range of books, articles, and online publications dedicated to the problem of failure. Much of the material is aimed at helping leaders and professional groups deal with failure by using strategies connected with risk management and quality control. Some failures are classified simply as bad, in that they arise from preventable causes and result in negative outcomes. Others are more neutral, unavoidable constituents of complex systems. Some are good, and can be fruitfully turned into success. Either way, business theorists and leadership coaches alike agree that all failures, both the bad and the neutral sort, can be turned into positive learning experiences when anticipated and managed well.

Reflecting on all this newly published research got me thinking again about failure in the Christian life, and how we deal with it. Even a brief reading of the Bible is enough to deliver to the open-minded reader a disturbing dose of realism about failure. It provides little justification for any kind of “pie-in-the-sky” interpretation of human existence. Arising from the lived human crises of civil and international war, famine, personal displacement, slavery, work, political rivalry, tribal feuding, family breakdown, moral failure, sickness, suffering and death, the biblical writings are imbued with a deep sense of the tragic and an unembarrassed acceptance of human limitations. In its greatest heroes — Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, Paul — we find such character flaws and personal defects as deceit, vanity, fear, avarice, unbelief, pride, conceit, and self-pity. In its happiest stories of success we find ominous signs of threat and intrigue and vulnerability, so that we can seldom count on the fidelity and goodness of the characters or on the continuance of conditions that make for lasting success. Everything hangs by a thread.

Christian Faith and Failure

In some ways, being a Christian helps us deal with the common human experience of failure. Faith in Christ, assurance of his abiding fidelity to us, hope in times of doubt or darkness, confidence in the pledge of God’s forgiveness: all these sustain us in and through the many failings that afflict human existence: habitual sins, chronic vulnerabilities, personality hang-ups, nagging areas of temptation, wrestlings of conscience, inability to progress in holiness and love and virtue, family conflicts, relationship issues, and so on.

But on another level, being a Christian can complicate the experience of failure. Just recently I exchanged email correspondence with a long-time, deeply committed Christian friend, who lamented about his “failing struggle for some amendment of life.” It seemed strange to hear this from a man whose life, at least from my point of view, seems like such a successful, powerful witness to Christ. It made me wonder what it means when we get to the end of our earthly sojourn and look back on our Christian lives and struggles and efforts and perceive them as mostly failed. Why is our “struggle for amendment,” enacted in faith and prayer and with the best intentions we can muster, apparently so weak, paltry, ineffective and vain? Specifically, why do people who believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, who have the Spirit of God living in them, who pray and go to church and want to honor God in their lives and actions, who want to amend their lives, how is it that such people — how is it that we — can fail, and fail often and sometimes so miserably, to do what we are called to do, to do what we want to do?

I’m not talking about the odd venial mishap, little hiccups along the way. I’m talking about major failings, catastrophic breakdowns, breaches of faith and trust that result in irreparable damage, consequences that change your or others’ lives forever, that incapacitate you and stunt spiritual growth, that set you back so dramatically that you really do feel that maybe there is no redemption. Maybe it’s a major relationship failure, an unrecoverable breakdown with your parents or siblings or fiancé or spouse. Maybe it’s a major vocational failure, that leads to retrenchment or nervous breakdown or total unemployability. Maybe it’s a major moral failure, a transgression of boundaries, a passionate plunge, an unjustifiable indiscretion. Or maybe it’s a situation that you have somehow contributed to or brought about through a bad decision, a stupid action, a failure of nerve, a loss of faith, a betrayal of trust, an oversight in responsibility. The point is, you can’t undo it. You can’t go back. You’ve failed, and the failure sticks and now constitutes the structure of your life.

So how do we reconcile this deep, inherent, architectonic vulnerability to failure, and Christ’s call to holiness, or indeed, the whole data of Christian revelation?

Theologies of Failure

There are theologians who have in recent years tried to explore this question of Christian failure in a studied way. In her book Theology of Failure, Marika Rose assumes failure as the premise for theology and the mission of the Church.¹ She draws on the thought of the Slovenian atheist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who reads the crucifixion of Christ as the disintegration of all meaning and divine reference for human existence. Her book is aimed not so much at helping us deal with failure as at making failure the normal ground for Christian identity.

A very different take on failure is offered by Jesuit John Navone in a couple of books dating back to the 1970s.² Navone starts from mystical meditation on Christ’s death as the paradigmatic story of human failure, citing as inspiration a series of reflections given during his ordination retreat in 1962 by Roderick MacKenzie S.J.. Speaking of Jesus on the cross, MacKenzie had said, “When he was dying on Calvary, [Jesus] did not have the consolation of a success story for his lifelong mission; rather, he died with the broken heart of a total human failure!”

Navone comments:

Humanly speaking, Jesus had miserably failed to convert his beloved people. He died a total reject. It is only in the light of Christian faith in his resurrection that what failed by human standards succeeded before God. The Risen Christ is the answer of God to human failure.

Navone also refers to “the perennial experience of failure in the life of the church.”³ And you don’t need to go that far back in church history to know what he means. The recent pedophile crisis is simply another chapter in a long litany of spectacular failures to fulfil our divine calling. All of which underscores our radical, total need for mercy, individually and corporately, our unreserved dependence, until the day we die, upon the all-sufficient grace of God in Jesus Christ crucified. For Navone, this sums up the theology of the Cross preached by the Apostle Paul and proclaimed by the New Testament Church. This was the Paul who acknowledged, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. And what I hate, I do . . . I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out…. What a wretch of a man I am!” (Rom 7:15–24) It was to this same Paul that the Lord said: “My grace is enough for you. For my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9)

This weird logic is what theologians call the theology of the cross. The theology of the cross is not just the message about God’s love revealed in Christ on the cross, the message of him being crucified for our sakes, to take away our sin. That’s all true, but the theology of the cross goes deeper, and is more paradoxical, troubling, even scandalous. It’s based on Saint Paul’s conviction that God has specifically chosen what is weak and despised, failed and foolish to serve as his privileged modes of saving activity (1 Cor 1:26–31).

It is important to understand what this message of the cross does not mean for the problem of failure, and here I would like to go beyond Navone toward something more closely akin to the thought of Martin Luther. Unlike the message espoused in a lot of the self-help and business leadership manuals, the message of the cross is not some therapeutic tool to help us turn our failures into successes. Rather, the message of the cross says that in the humiliating death of Jesus Christ, weakness and failure and ignorance have been permanently constituted as the normal sites in which God our Savior wants to meet and find us. In Luther’s words:

For what is good for us is hidden, and that so deeply that it is hidden under its opposite. Thus our life is hidden under death, love for ourselves under hate for ourselves, glory under ignominy, salvation under damnation, our kingship under exile, heaven under hell, wisdom under foolishness, righteousness under sin, power under weakness.⁴

For Luther, the cross of Jesus challenges all the dominant canons of human measurement — secular or religious — that value reason, success, knowledge, spirit, and power, and forces us to re-evaluate and recalibrate every scale of value and assessment.⁵ Only in God’s own self-humiliation, and in our participation in it, can we experience redemption in a way that stands up to “the test of reality,” the reality of our own humiliation, the reality of human tragedy, the reality of human failure.⁶

Much more could be said about Luther’s theology as a resource for constructing a theology of failure. I would like, however, to explore two examples from the creative arts in which we see dramatically played out this dynamic of re-evaluation and recalibration of human values in the light of the cross.

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

The first is from the novel entitled The Idiot by the famous nineteenth-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. The title The Idiot refers to the main character of the story, Prince Myshkin. Myshkin’s character is cast in the form of the holy fool, which in Russian Christian tradition refers to these holy, prophetic, Christ-figure types, who through their simplicity, naïveté, and sometimes even stupidity, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.⁷ In creating Myshkin’s character, Dostoevsky had wanted to portray “a positively beautiful man.” In part, Myshkin seems to embody Dostoevsky’s own experience as a kind of social misfit, and continually wracked with epileptic fits that would leave him physically and mentally shattered for days. At the beginning of the novel, Myshkin is just returning from convalescence in Switzerland, an experience Dostoevsky had shared and during which many ideas for The Idiot seemed to have crystallized. On the other hand, Myshkin is a true innocent, while Dostoevsky’s personal life was a veritable moral and social train-wreck: living in abject poverty, hopelessly addicted to gambling, always in debt, suffering depression and suicidal thoughts, and of course, the epilepsy.

Prince Myshkin initially appears in the story as a simple, naïve holy fool. Innocent in his faith in God and love for neighbor, he falls in with the dastardly Roghozin, a lecherous rogue who taunts Myshkin for his goodness and ignorance of evil. Yet through Myshkin’s simple kindness and deeply compassionate imagination, we are led through the story to believe and hope in him as a Christ figure, who by meek and holy love can redeem the lost and wayward souls who seem magnetically to gravitate around him.

But as the story progresses, Myshkin begins to unravel. As one commentator describes it, “Dostoevsky intentionally and gradually weakens Myshkin’s holy foolish identity as the narrative shifts to rumor and hearsay.”⁸ What begins as holy innocence and naïveté moves increasingly to folly and failure. In a world of deepening viciousness, self-obsession, and perversion, Russian Christians of Dostoyevsky’s time looked to their holy fools to redeem the world, to incarnate through their mad witness something of the pure and untarnished world of God.⁹ to exemplify Paul’s wisdom of the Cross (1 Cor. 1:18–24). The fool for Christ’s sake is a male or female person (or a hagiographical figure) often the subject of a saint’s cult, who makes a public display of his lowliness and uncleanliness. He or she acts for ‘Christ’s sake’ in two senses: first, to commune in the sacrificial humility exemplified on the Cross; and second, to bring others back to Christ by confronting them with a shocking holy foolish instantiation of the Cross. The fool’s behaviour thus has a militant edge. His or her own self-humiliation exposes pride and hypocrisy in the same way as Paul’s irony and sarcasm shames his addressees: ‘We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ! We are weak but you are strong! You are distinguished, but we are dishonoured!’ (1 Cor. 4:10)” Priscilla Hunt, “Holy Foolishness as a Key to Russian Culture,” in Hunt and Kobets, Holy Foolishness in Russia, 1–14, at 2.] But increasingly Dostoevsky allows Myshkin to collapse under pressure from the invading spiritual and moral decline in which he is enmeshed. Engaged to one woman out of pity, in love with another, committed to compassion but unable to say no, Myshkin, whom Dostoevsky had wanted to portray as the “positively beautiful man,” becomes a repulsive living contradiction, losing touch with all reality. Myshkin is “torn apart” by his internal contradictions, “half-saint (or half-idiot) and half-man, half out of the world and half committed to it.”¹⁰ In the words of Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank, “No longer able to distinguish between his vision of universal love and the necessary exclusions and limiting choices of life, he [Myshkin] is presented as having passed altogether beyond the bounds of accepted social codes.”¹¹

Shocked and offended by the novel’s tragic and dark conclusion, many commentators are left baffled and dissatisfied, judging the story a failure. As one writer puts it, “The novel ends in abject failure and denial of Christ’s divinity.” And so what some call Dostoevsky’s “most mythical text” turns out to be “also his darkest, ending with no image of spiritual redemption or hope.”¹²

But was this yet another failed novel on Dostoevsky’s part? Or was it rather a novel about failure? It is surely significant that the image of Christ that recurs twice through the novel is the “Body of the Dead Christ,” the painting by the sixteenth-century German painter Hans Holbein (the younger). In contrast to the beautiful icons in the Russian tradition, which depict the victorious and risen Christ in stern and glorious splendor, Holbein’s painting depicts Christ having just been taken down from the cross as a grotesque, macabre corpse, riddled with wounds, his pierced hands and feet splayed in frozen agony, his face gaunt and lifeless, his skin almost putrid gray. It is a strangely haunting image.¹³ When Myshkin first sees this painting hanging in a friend’s house, he exclaims with shock: “A man could even lose his faith from that painting!”¹⁴

Later in the story, Myshkin thinks back to that painting, remarking how “it produced a strange uneasiness in me.” Normally, he reflects, artists paint Jesus, even on the cross, with some “extraordinary beauty of face. They strive to preserve that beauty even in His most terrible agonies.” In the Holbein painting, he observes, “There’s no trace of beauty. It is in every detail the corpse of a man who has endured infinite agony. . . . So that there’s still a look of suffering in the face of the dead man, as though he were still feeling it.” The whole scene forces upon Myshkin a troubling question:

If death is so awful and the laws of nature so mighty, how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who vanquished nature in His lifetime . . . ? Looking at such a picture, one conceives of nature in the shape of an immense, merciless, dumb beast, or more correctly . . . in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed and swallowed up a great priceless Being. . . . This picture expresses and unconsciously suggests to one the conception of such a dark, insolent, unreasoning and eternal Power to which everything is in subjection. . . .

The people surrounding such a man, who witnessed his death, “must have experienced the most terrible anguish and consternation on that evening, which had crushed all their hopes, and almost their convictions.”

But that is precisely the Christ, the God, the scandalous redeemer, whom Dostoevsky wants to place before his readers. The weak God, the crucified God, the failed God. In which case, perhaps Myshkin’s progressive demise and mental collapse is an intentional strategy in the story’s plot. As Edward Wasiolek claims, “It is only a hopelessly pragmatic and schematic mind, weighing moral worth by some statistic of help and harm, that would read the tally sheet of results as the measure of Myshkin’s worth. . . . If we were to measure Christ by pragmatic results, he too might appear to be an emissary of darkness rather than of light.”¹⁵

Dostoevsky set out to portray a positively beautiful man. He almost reached this goal with Myshkin. But in the end he missed the mark. “Myshkin sought . . . to enact an almost eschatological abolition of suffering through radical love and unearthly forgiveness; and he positively failed. The climatic scene of the novel leaves us with the ineffectual paradox of a broken man.”¹⁶

Yet this non-resolution has meaning. The Idiot is crafted to have the same effect on its readers as the Dead Christ painting had on Dostoevsky. It is designed to confront the believer with the scandal of Christianity, to crush false hope, to threaten ill-founded conviction. As Frank Guan says of all Dostoevsky’s great novels, through them the author enacts “the rigorous and ruthless crash-testing of his Christian convictions against existing social reality.” Just as in the Dead Christ, the painter Hans Holbein, says Joseph Frank, confronts Christian faith with all that seems to negate it, and precisely in that negation, and never apart from it, affirms, however tenuously, its truth and reality.¹⁷

Shusako Endo’s Silence

The second example I would like to explore, in which the message of the cross plays out in dramatic, disturbing realism, is from the novel Silence, by Japanese author Shusako Endo. This story was recently made famous through the movie by Martin Scorsese, for whom the story painfully demonstrates that “God’s love is more mysterious” than we know, “that he leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize.”¹⁸

Silence tells the story of two Portuguese missionaries in Japan in the early seventeenth century. At that time Christians were suffering systematic persecution at the hands of Japanese authorities, and a great many Christians, under pain of torture, had apostatized and renounced Christ. Aware of the difficulties ahead, the two priests are committed to stay faithful unto death, to sacrifice all for Christ.

As the story unfolds, two characters emerge as central. The first, Fr. Rodrigues, one of the two priests, increasingly suffers as he witnesses God’s silence in the midst of such innocent suffering. The second is Kichijiro, a kind of Judas figure, who repeatedly betrays his fellow-Christians and renounces Christ to save his own skin, only to return, again and again, to beg forgiveness in the sacrament of penance. Although Fr Rodrigues obligingly absolves the wretched Kichijiro, the voice of Kichijiro’s tearful confession comes over “like the whining of a dog,” while the sacramental words of absolution leave a “bitter taste” in his mouth. He knows he should love this fallen brother, but in his heart he despises his weakness, resents him for his infidelity, for it represents all that contradicts Rodrigues’s deepest convictions about what it means to be a priest, what it means to be a Christian. He can let go of his anger towards Kichijiro, but he can’t let go of his contempt.

Eventually, however, Rodrigues himself is worn down. Since they can’t break him directly, the authorities switch tactics: they torture his parishioners day and night until he denounces Christ. At last, broken down, Rodrigues is led out to make his act of apostasy, to step on the bronze icon of Christ. The face which he had always loved so dearly, so tenderly, now lies on the ground at his feet, grimed with mud. As he stares at the icon, the fumie, as the Japanese call it, his whole body trembles. In his raised foot he “feels a dull, heavy pain.” For he is about to “trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man.” And then, breaking his silence at last, “the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: ‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.’ The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.”

This simple act of apostasy, though made under duress, completely and decisively changes Rodrigues’s life and faith. He surrenders his will to the authorities, abandons his priestly and Christian identity, takes a new name, gets married, adopts Buddhism, and begins a life of collaboration with the authorities in eradicating all traces of Christianity from Japan. It is a shocking, seemingly subversive ending to the story. In his movie adaptation of the novel, Scorsese slightly modifies the ending with a tiny detail. After Rodrigues’s death, as his Japanese wife is farewelling his body before its cremation, she surreptitiously inserts into his hand a tiny crucifix, a sign that she, along with him, had secretly maintained their faith in Christ to the end, despite the outward betrayal.

Even with Scorsese’s ending, many Christian observers who have read Silence or seen the movie criticize it for justifying apostasy, for deconstructing Christianity, for its apparent license to betray the faith when life or well-being are under threat. But there is another way to read it. Through his own failure Rodrigues undergoes a humiliating transformation. From a purely formal, objective perspective, he becomes a full-blown traitor, an apostate like the despised Kichijiro. But in this failed state he actually becomes closer to Christ. As Japanese commentator Hitoshi Sano writes, Rodrigues

becomes a priest of a different sort, for he had felt a dull and heavy pain in his feet on the fumie and sensed the presence of Jesus who shared his pain. His Lord becomes different from the God that had been preached in the churches. Rodrigues loves Christ in a different way than he had before. He is no longer a self-righteous priest who entertains the established Christian faith but a suffering priest who accepts “humanity when wasted like rags and tatters.” He has to question his sincerity and conviction every time he is forced to acknowledge his weakness, but at the same time he renews his faith in love of the Lord. Therefore, he can pardon Kichijiro’s betrayal and hear his confession.¹⁹

Can we really hope?

Dostoevsky and Endo challenge us to re-evaluate our scale of values, especially our most precious spiritual and religious ones. They force us to ask the question: is it really possible to hope when we have failed so badly, so deeply, when failure has become so endemically embedded in our life’s history? Is it possible to live, and to die, in the fragile hope that exactly this crucified God will save us, that exactly this God is enough? Or do we insist on a glorious, triumphant redemption in our own life history, manifest to all, in which the scandal and absurdity of the cross, and our own failures, remain clinically and comfortably buried and out of sight?

Perhaps, overwhelmed and even scandalized by failure, I honestly feel that I cannot hope, that I cannot be saved, that “my sin stands unremittingly before me” (Ps 51:3). I hear the words of Jesus, “Whoever denies me before others, I will also deny before my Father in heaven” (Mt 10:33), and shudder at all the exclusions from the kingdom of heaven (1 Cor 6:9–10; Rev 21:8). No, I conclude, there can be no hope for me.

It is then that I need someone else — another person, a community, God himself — to hope for me. Herein lies a critical difference between the mysterious fates of Peter, the first of the Apostles, and Judas, “the son of destruction” (John 17:12). When the latter, struck with the horrific consequences of his betrayal, tried to repent, when in remorse he made some movement towards reparation, he found no mercy, no open door, no offer of hope. It is an oft-overlooked but tragic detail in Matthew’s Gospel (27:3–4):

When Judas, who betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty silver coins to the chief priests and the elders. “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”

“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”

Peter, meanwhile, similarly racked with guilt, similarly trapped by failure, makes no such attempt to right his wrongs, and seems rather to find solace in escape, returning to his old job. He is only restored when Jesus personally seeks him out and rekindles hope in a future life of responsible service (John 21:15–19). What would have happened if Judas, like Kichijiro, had found a humbled Rodrigues with the sacrament of reconciliation? What would have happened if Peter had not been sought out and found by Jesus? The fallen and despairing need to be reached, surrounded, and accompanied by a community of hope.

Authentic Christian existence only begins when I have come to the end of all earthly, human hopes, when, against all hope, “wasted like rags and tatters,” I am thrown utterly upon the mercy veiled in the suffering flesh of the dying God. For what is hope that is seen? What is faith if we already experience in full that which, this side of death, we can only believe? As the writer to the Hebrews says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). With a certain chronic melancholy, I am both troubled and consoled by Paul’s “somehow” when expressing his hope of salvation: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Phil 3:10).

These words attest to the ultimate source and power of Christian hope: the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death. Christ is risen. That’s the fundamental Christian confession, and that because he is risen, we also will rise with him. If that is true, then “somehow” it is possible for us failures to be saved. And so we wait. What else can we do? We wait for our redemption. We wait for our resurrection. We groan and travail inwardly, with the Spirit of God, and with Myshkin and Rodrigues and Kichijiro, with Peter and Judas and with all creation, for the redemption of our failed histories, the healing of our broken hearts, and for our final, other-worldly revealing as the beloved, glorious children of God.