Both Worm and Worthy
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When Oprah Winfrey ended her long-running daytime talk show in 2011, I tuned in to the final episode, recognizing the significance of the host’s presence and influence on American life. A moment that stood out to me from the finale was the exhortation she left her viewers and fans with: that they see themselves as worthy. She repeated a phrase, mantra-like, to her audience: “You are worthy.”
This is one of our world’s favorite statements, an inspirational saying that shows up on Instagram squares, on TV and in movies, in conversations both private and public. Telling someone “You are worthy” goes hand in hand with the push for stronger self-esteem we’ve seen since the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s now part of our therapeutic culture’s focus on mental health and emotional stability. Say it enough, and perhaps those feelings of inadequacy or the lingering guilt you feel for the undeserved blessings you’ve received can go away. You are worthy.
Worthy or Worm?
The theologically minded Christian, the regular churchgoer accustomed to singing countless worship songs that declare God alone to be worthy of worship and devotion, recognizes immediately something is off base when we go around affirming each other’s “worthiness.” The whole point of grace is that God bestows unmerited favor on the unworthy, right?
The parable of the prodigal son hinges on the young man’s acknowledgment he’s “unworthy” to be called a son (Luke 15). Another parable describes the faithful as “unworthy servants” (7:7–10). The apostle Paul claimed he was “unworthy to be called an apostle” (1 Cor. 15:9). The Book of Common Prayer casts us in the role of “unworthy sinners” who approach the table of the Lord only through the cross.
Many of the most beloved hymns in Christian history emphasize the canyon between God’s grace and our sin. John Newton thought “amazing grace” a “sweet sound” because it saved him, a wretch. Isaac Watts marvels at the question “Alas, and did my Savior bleed and did my Sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” And Charles Wesley’s great Trinitarian hymn “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” juxtaposes the singer’s admission (“So poor a worm as I”) with the glorious calling of holiness (“May to thy great glory live”).
These hymns take their inspiration from the psalmist’s despair (Ps. 22:6) and from Bildad’s speech to Job, using worms and maggots as a striking description of human mortality and finitude (Job 25).
Paradox of Human Sinfulness
In these Scriptures and songs, we find a good corrective to the temptation to overestimate ourselves. But the answer to a wrongheaded emphasis on humanity’s “worthiness” isn’t to focus solely on what has sometimes been called “worm theology.” There’s a way of going astray here on the other side, of debasing humanity to the point we lose the power in the paradox of original sin.
The Bible teaches two truths simultaneously: (1) we have tremendous worth and value because of the image of God in us, and (2) we’re lowly sinners, undeserving of salvation, in desperate need of God’s grace.
An overemphasis on human worth will make grace expected: Well, of course God sent his Son to save us. We’re so worthy, after all! Go in that direction and repentance is unnecessary. Why wouldn’t God save you? An overemphasis on human depravity will make grace powerless: I’m nothing more than a worm and will never amount to anything. Go in that direction and repentance is impossible. Why would God care?
The portrait we see in the Scriptures is more compelling. There we find both the utter sinfulness of humanity before a holy God and the truth that we’re made in his image and likeness. To be faithful to the text, we must uphold both truths: the inestimable worth and value of humans made in God’s image and the pervasiveness of human sin that renders us totally unworthy of salvation.
Both Wretched and Wonderful
The Oprah-fied version of American folk religion fails to take sin as seriously as the Bible does, leading us to imagine ourselves as something nearly divine, the center of the universe. But the more extreme reactions to that mistake among theologically minded believers fail to do justice to the implications of being made in God’s image, leading us to imagine ourselves as hopelessly debased, mere worms crawling for a time on this earth.
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The scriptural picture will not allow us to occupy the deified state, where we think of ourselves (not God) as worthy, but neither will it allow us to see ourselves ever and only in a debased state, nothing more than worthless worms. No, we’re both wretched and wonderful. We’re beauty and the beast. Blaise Pascal believed our wretchedness proved our greatness: “It is the wretchedness of a great lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.” Peter Kreeft sums it up this way: “We are metaphysically better and morally worse than we dream.”
John Stott speaks to this:
Our “self” is a complex entity of good and evil, glory and shame. . . . What we are (our self or personal identity) is partly the result of the Creation (the image of God), and partly the result of the Fall (the image defaced). . . . I’m a Jekyll and Hyde, a mixed-up kid, having both dignity, because I was created in God’s image, and depravity, because I am fallen and rebellious. I am both noble and ignoble, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, upright and twisted, image of God and slave of the Devil. My true self is what I am by creation, which Christ came to redeem. My fallen self is what I am by the Fall, which Christ came to destroy.
Two Wonders
What does this mean for us today?
First, we must be on guard against statements and sayings that seem to recast Oprah’s version of self-love and worthiness in Christian terms, baptizing an overly positive view of humanity that fails to reckon with our sinfulness. Such an approach gives a Christian veneer to our culture’s obsession with self-esteem.
Second, we must be on guard against an overreaction, as if the way to counter the first falsehood is to overemphasize a “worm theology,” stressing so strongly our sinfulness that we lose sight of our worth and value as people made in God’s image. Such an approach hides the beauty at work when God’s Spirit awakens in us a desire for nobility, where through repentance and faith our sinful chains fall away and we begin to live into God’s high calling for the humans he has redeemed.
Two wonders here that I confess
My worth and my unworthiness
My value fixed, my ransom paid
At the cross
(Trevin Wax is vice president of research and resource development at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to The Washington Post, Religion News Service, World, and Christianity Today. He has taught courses on mission and ministry at Wheaton College and has lectured on Christianity and culture at Oxford University. He is a founding editor of The Gospel Project, has served as publisher for the Christian Standard Bible, and is the author of multiple books, including The Thrill of Orthodoxy, The Multi-Directional Leader, Rethink Your Self, This Is Our Time, and Gospel Centered Teaching. His podcast is Reconstructing Faith. He and his wife, Corina, have three children. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook, or receive his columns via email.)