Why an unbiblical view of perfection makes Christians into bigots
Evergreen — a developed piece
What does perfect even mean?
I love the kids’ TV show Bluey. It’s way more insightful and moving than a children’s cartoon has any right to be. I often finish an episode teary‑eyed with something major to ponder for the rest of the day.
In one episode, Bluey is trying to draw a “perfect” picture for a Father’s Day card. When she realises she doesn’t actually know what “perfect” means, she asks her sister. Bingo replies: “Really, really, really, really… good.”
During the first theology class I took when training to be a priest, I realised I had the same problem. I didn’t really know what “perfect” meant either. And what’s more, the way Christians have talked about God’s perfection has quietly smuggled some pretty toxic ideas into church culture.
When most of us think of God as perfect, I suspect we mean something like Bingo: “really, really good.” But in some schools of theology, God’s perfection is described as complete, finished, unmoved and unmovable – nothing can be added, nothing can change.
Where this gets really dangerous is when we import that idea into our hopes of becoming more like God. If we imagine perfection as a finished, fixed point, then any difference between people looks like movement. And movement can only be either towards perfection or away from it.
This ‘static’ perfection creates a ladder where those at the top—the wealthy, the healthy, and the ‘together’—are seen as closer to God’s nature. By default, this pushes the marginalized to the bottom, suggesting that their struggles or differences are defects to be cured rather than diverse reflections of a creative God.
On that one‑dimensional scale, the powerful one is the “perfect” person the point at the very top. All our differences then have to be ranked as better or worse. Are you strong? Better. Weak? Worse. Do you fit conventional beauty standards? Better. Do you not? Worse. Calm, self‑controlled, productive, always “together”? Better. Needy, emotional, limited, still working things out? Worse.
That might sound like an overstatement. Obviously nobody says they think like this, right?
But if we’re honest, our churches are full of subtle hierarchies. Like a school dining hall, we all feel the pull to sit with the “cool kids”. We instinctively respect the talented musician, the successful entrepreneur, the man with the deep voice. And I’ve seen too many friends quietly pushed to the edges – or right out of church – when they voiced their doubts, lost the capacity to “contribute”, or didn’t want to go along with the more unhealthy parts of a church’s culture.
Where did this idea come from?
It turns out that this warped view of perfection is rooted in Greek philosophy and has very little to do with how the Bible itself talks about perfection. I’ll go into that nerdiness in more depth in a future post, but here I’m going to look at one of the most famous quotes that relates to perfection. It’s actually quoted by one of the most significant sources of this kind of theology, Thomas Aquinas, at the top of his account of God’s perfection:
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Matthew 5.48
Aquinas will have known that Jesus’ words here are in the middle of a speech that pushes explicitly against the kind of exclusion that this theology tends to motivate:
“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Matthew 5.46–48
If Jesus sees the most appropriate moment to mention divine perfection as in a discussion of enemy love, why do we so often see God as represented by the attractive, powerful and emotionless? How did a call to love beyond our circle become tangled up with an image of perfection that quietly pushes certain kinds of people to the edge?
Proving God’s existence vs meeting him in Jesus.
Theologians like Aquinas, like many Christians today, was preoccupied with proving God’s existence. A key argument for God’s existence is the baffling idea that God must exist because it is better to exist than not to exist. This idea of perfection makes whatever we value most about ourselves into a requirement for God.
As the witty remark goes: “God made mankind in his image, and man returned the compliment.” so we end up with a God who looks suspiciously like us. and a point of perfection where to become less like my ideal of humanness is to become degenerate, less human, less good.
But this is not the God of Jesus.
What we see in Jesus is a God who doesn’t hold his nose at the parts of life that we run away from. He doesn’t recoil from powerlessness, sickness or abandonment. Instead, he embraces it. He enters into it. He makes it his own. At the cross, Jesus was tortured and shamed in solidarity with those that we push to the edges.
He embraced that which we most fear: rejection, pain, and death.
If this is who God is, our idol of perfection is the complete opposite of true divine perfection.
Maybe we need to stop trying to think our way to God and instead meet him in Jesus:
“who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.”
- The Apostles’ Creed