Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Old Paths

NOTE: I discovered this while going through some old journal notes. I wrote this in December 06, but never got around to posting it. I thought I'd share it. Reading through this again today I think I may have missed an important point. Perhaps the old godly paths are not so much our doctrines, but our godly lifestyle - again being over knowledge.


This is what the Lord says:
“Stop at the crossroads and look around.
Ask for the old, godly way, and walk in it.
Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls.
But you reply, ‘No, that’s not the road we want!’
Jerimiah 6:16 NLT


The sermon last night was an exhortation for us to return to the "old ways." I found myself being somewhat conflicted by it. For my pastor, returning to the old ways meant staying true to the doctrines you have been taught, and trusting in the wisdom of the pastorate.

My difficulty began when I realized that some of those doctrines I have been taught (and have taught others) have no Bilbical support, and in some cases even contradict the clear teaching of scripture. Once the Biblical foundation beneath these doctrinal pillars was shown to be lacking, I began to wonder what other doctrines I had been taught were in error. Everything became suspect. This was a very uncomfortable position to be in.

It occured to me during the sermon that each denomination would interpret the "old paths" differently. For Pentecostals it may mean repentance, baptism in Jesus name and receiving the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues. For Catholics it might be the rosery, confession, and faith in the Pope or apostalic succession. Perhaps we all need to reach a little further back when returning to the old godly paths. Perhaps we should reach clear back to Jesus himself and the teachings of his apostles - that is, perhaps we should reach back to the Bible, which testifies of Jesus.

We study the Bible and then build doctrines based on scripture. We then teach those doctrines, boldly proclaim them, defend them and debate them. Those that follow our teaching then believe those doctrines based primariy on our own authority and their faith in us. Sure, we quote select scriptures that demonstrate the validity of our doctrine, but many skip over or explain away scriptures that don't fit our doctrine very well. Since students only remember a small percentage of what they are taught, what are they likely to remember - our oft repeated doctrine, or the scriptures we use to support it. The result is that we believe a whole number of things and repeat them to each other without really knowing what the Bible actually has to say about the subject. This makes us rigid, defensive and fragile.

I believe this was one of the primary weakness of the Pharasees. They had an entire "church culture," an entire series of beliefs spawned from the scriptures, but were not the scriptures themselves. Their doctrines were far more rigid than the scripture itself, and it lacked the scripture's power and purpose. Thus they would allow a priest to minister on the sabbath, but would stone a prophet for performing a miraculous healing on the sabboth. They would pull an ox out of a pit on the sabbath, but not suffer a lame man to be healed.

What would happen if we taught the Bible instead of our doctrines? What would happen if we maximized the authority of Jesus and the scripture and minimized our own authority? What would happen if we taught those parts of scripture that we really don't understand and admitted as much instead of teaching our best guess as if its the authoritative explanation?

I'm actually trying this out in two different settings., and the results are interesting. The first group is a weekly meeting consisting mostly of high school students. I asked the class to read through a book of the Bible at the rate of five chapters a week. During class I would encourage the class to share insights they discovered and to ask questions. I asked them to purchase a New Living Translation to make this reading easier. Reading rates were at first quite high, but then dropped off. Students were not as comfortable sharing insights as they were asking questions, though they sometimes had profound answers to each other's questions.

Student questions tended to gravitate toward the most difficult passages of scripture that even scholars only suggest possible interpretations. They probably gravitated toward these passages because they are normally completely ignored by pastors and teachers. It was totally new to them. To this I offered both a short and a long answer. The short answer was that I didn't know the answer. The long answer was a discussion of the possible explanations that scholars, pastors and teachers have suggested. This clearly frustrated some students who wanted to be told the right answer to memorize, and who considered it a waste of time to think about the meaning and implications of something you cannot conclusively answer.


So why would this lesson trouble me? Having seen that some of the old ways I had been taught are false, I know I can never go back to them. Yet the path that I am to take now is not entirely clear. It's probably the same old uncertainty of the future and fear of making a mistake. There is also a certain danger and fear when questioning the foundations you are standing on. This lesson effectively warned me of the perils of leaving the foundations that I now know to be faulty. This resonated with my fear.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Packaging Truth

While driving to work this morning I was listening to a preacher on the radio. He reiterated a common concern among church leaders. He said that the first generation of a church (or religious movement) has a hunger for God and for his Word, and labors to understand the scriptures and develop doctrines. The second generation defends these truths and doctrines and works hard to extend them. The third generation however is passive. They don’t value the doctrines because they haven’t worked for them. They seem to miss the whole point of church and have no zeal. While he didn’t do so, I’ve often heard the dilemma of the third generation described in terms of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or David, Solomon and Rehoboam – where in each case the spiritual life and character of the 3rd generation paled in comparison to the first.

How do you tell a man who has spent much of his life becoming “the” authority on scripture and systematizing doctrine that much of his efforts have been misguided? His purpose wasn’t to systematize truth and teach truth, but to live the truth, embody the truth, teach a love for the truth, and a desire for God. By becoming THE authority on scripture who has done all the seeking and searching for the next generation, what place is left for the young person – what unexplored territory exists for the young adventurer? If the whole world has been settled and is tamed how can you bemoan that there are no brave explorers in the next generation? Where’s the romance in memorizing a book of facts? The romance is in the digging, the searching, and the daring exploration.

Life in the spirit is not like scientific knowledge. In math, one explorer discovered algebra. Another person may have taken algebra and added Calculus. Another may have taken calculus and added trigonometry. And so each person’s work was built upon the work of those who preceded him. While that is how science progresses it is not how spiritual life works. Spiritual life isn’t about knowledge – it’s about a relationship with God. A young man may see a beautiful girl and ask all his friends about her, but he will never know her unless he takes a step toward her and speaks to her for himself. Should he choose to love her and make it his life’s ambition to cherish her and know her, no amount of books could convey the truth that is their relationship together. Every person must explore God and embark on life’s adventure with Him for themselves.

Another part of the problem is that when we systematize truth into theology is can become a straight jacket to the next generation. It becomes a series of fences that we don’t want them to cross, and a box that we don’t expect them to think outside of. Therefore they can never hope to go beyond us. Yet the scriptures are much more vibrant, deep and even ambiguous than our theology. But what if we missed something? What if God wants to take them where we ourselves have not gone? Perhaps we should teach the next generation a love for the scriptures and an appreciation of our theological discoveries, rather than a love for our theological discoveries with an appreciation of the scriptures.

Lastly, the third generation can become intimidated by the “greatness” of our stature and the length of our shadow. Yet when we started out we had no greatness or shadow - just humility, ignorance and a hunger for truth and for God. Perhaps we could build God up more and ourselves less. Ultimately its really about introducing each generation to God, and not about passing on our own legacy.

Truth

I want to know the truth,
God wants me to be the truth.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Greatness

I want to be someone great.
God wants me to be someone great.
We don't mean the same thing.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Understanding the scriptures

Understanding. Gestalt. Seeing the whole and grasping in your mind the wholeness of it and how it all comes together and works together. Spiritual gestalt is very hard to achieve because of our scriptural citation methods. Knowing the individual verses of scripture and how to weave them together to tell a story or communicate a truth is powerful and important – but also severely limiting. The Bible as a collection of verses and stories from which to draw is only a shadow of what it truly is. Much division and controversy in the church is caused not by what the Bible does or does not say, but by our handling of it. Different groups treasure different individual verses while skipping over others. Thus different groups can quote from the same book in the Bible, even using some of the same verses and yet do so in support of opposing ideas. There have been times in fact where I have heard a sermon preached from one verse, that could have been completely overturned had the preacher simply read the next verse.

To achieve true understanding of scripture however, we must mature past seeing collections of individual verses of scripture, to seeing each book as a whole. I am currently studying Romans (I’m actually listening to it in the car over and over again). Within Romans are individual verses that, standing alone, are contradictory. This does not mean that the book of Romans contradicts itself. In fact, we humans use language in the same way all the time. We hold up opposing ideas, we compare and contrast them, we describe different aspects of a more complex whole – and none of these individual parts accurately explain the whole of a concept we are trying to communicate.

Communication…that’s what we must remember the writers were trying to do. They wanted – or God wanted to communicate something to us. We must hear them and him out completely if we are to have any chance of understanding what God is trying to tell us. If we just hear portions of the conversation, we will almost certainly misunderstand.

We hear the words a person says. We consider the meaning of those words. Then beyond that, we must understand what the person is actually trying to communicate, and finally, why.

We must learn to look beyond the mere words a person says to what they mean by those words. Without the greater context of the whole book however, how can we possibly do that?