Cringe is an instinctive recoil from something you don’t want to be associated with. Usually because of embarrassment. There are associated categories. Camp is something done in a flagrantly flamboyant way. It would be cringe, except that everyone knows it is being done for a joke. Tyler Perry’s Madea or the long history of men dressing up as women is camp. When you lose the joke and someone thinks it is serious, it is cringe inducing. And everyone just wants to get away from the uncomfortable situation. There flip sides to cringe and camp. Something that is venerable might be the opposite to camp. The Lord’s Supper is venerable. Simple vestments on a minister – the purpose of which are to disguise the actual man under the mantle of office – are venerable. At various times and places people have tried to turn them into camp. But sadly only the church itself seems to be able to do that when it stops treating the sacrament with veneration it becomes camp. And anyone associated with the church growth movement of the past 20-30 years probably knows the word winsome. It is the opposite of cringe. A winsome witness is one that attracts. Which was the entire goal of that movement.
The Bible and hence the church has a number of teachings, call them doctrines or dogmas. And these teachings really never change. The creeds are a summation of some of them: Creation and providence, the person of Christ and justification, Sanctification and means of the Holy Spirit. The catechism or the service itself adds the practice and administration of the Sacraments. There are other doctrines that grow out of the life of faith. And it is interesting to me how in each era of the church can treat certain doctrines as cringe and others as venerable, some as winsome while others as camp.
For example, the late middle ages had a thing for bridal imagery. You can hear Reformation echoes of it in many hymns. The Bridegroom Soon Will Call Us (LSB 514) or Soul, Adorn Yourself with Gladness (LSB 636) – “Hasten as a bride to meet him, and with loving rev’rence greet Him…” And such bridal language is solid biblical teaching. But in our sexually confused era many of these – especially if you go beyond the hymns and read for example Bernard of Cluny’s devotional writings – it dips into cringe. At least for men. Cringe at the level of “Jesus is My Boyfriend” songs.
Paul in our epistle reading today (1 Corinthians 12:1-11) is talking about a deeper teaching that causes the widest range of reactions. “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed.” To many high enlightenment academically trained theologians you have entered the realm of cringe. So much so that that many churches stopped teaching this doctrine. They developed their own doctrine called cessationism. A strict Calvinist would simply say 1 Corinthians 12 is a dead letter for all of us outside of the apostolic generation, because spiritual gifts have ceased. At the same time you have the largest modern Christian movement – Pentecostalism – which is completely centered around spiritual gifts and their use.
That division, much of Old Mainline Protestantism being cessationist, if not formally in reality, while many Christians being driven by their experiences into Pentecostal type churches, is exactly what Paul is trying to address. Most of the letter of 1 Corinthians is addressing various divisions. To the people that might find spiritual gifts as cringe, Paul straightforwardly says. “All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.” Don’t quench the Spirit. To the people who find them the only interesting thing, be aware of the danger. First Paul seems to pair them up. “To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge.” The flashier gifts find their balance in the more grounded. And these are all from the same Spirit. Don’t get haughty about your experience.
Paul’s point is that the one body has many members, and we all need each other. And if our era thinks hands are cringey, it would still be foolish to cut them off. Likewise, something might be very venerable, but if that is the only thing the church does, “if the whole body were an eye, where is the sense of hearing? (1 Corinthians 12:17).” If we let our era’s reactions, be they cringe or veneration, decide on the validity of doctrines, we probably find ourselves hacking up the body of the church. Instead we should seek out how the Spirit is “manifesting for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7).”
