Category Archives: Rant

Jesus, Rant, scripture, theology

Messengers versus Theologians

Okay, I know that the title is a false dichotomy. The problem is that I don’t think most know that it’s a false dichotomy, hence the reason I’m writing this.

In my travails to find a method of paying for food while I hopefully preach the Gospel in St. John’s after finishing my MDiv, I have had many conversations with pastors, and people in authority over denominations.

The most common question I get is what my goals are for future ministry. While I don’t always say it this way, my only desire is to prayerfully preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ accurately to people who need to hear it. The reason for this goal is simple, it’s what a pastor does. Yes, there is counseling, and visiting, and a host of administrative tasks, but all of those stem from the God-empowered accurate expression of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It’s important to remember that the task isn’t one of creativity (save in the means by which you preach it). The message is set, and we don’t get to change it. The Gospel is good news that we do not create, we simply report. Otherwise, we have a good story and not good news. The Gospel is a good story, but not one I wrote. I am called to accurately interpret the scriptures (yes, there is interpretation, but again, it is bounded by accuracy… I interpret what is actually there) to people who are around me, and if a pastor, to those entrusted to me.

This led, in at least one case, to a rather strange conversation about false teaching, theology, and the pastoral call. The man I was speaking to believed strongly in “love” as the central tenet of the Gospel (quite true, but open to misinterpretation), and felt that as long as we were doing good, we were preaching the Gospel.

He was wrong, of course. Good works are a proper and necessary effect of believing the Gospel (and if you are not moved to it by the Gospel, I doubt that you have heard it rightly), but it is not the Gospel itself. The Gospel is what we see in scripture as Christ crucified for our sake, that we might become fit worshipers of a gracious God. God becomes my surpassing treasure, and the good news is that there is a means of getting that eternally in Jesus Christ, through only the work of God for the glory of God.

This led to another short exchange about the question of false doctrine (which he referred to as debating about words). Indeed, there is fruitless theological discussion. There are many important distinctives between denominations that are not central to the Gospel, and we should not treat those with fundamental seriousness. But there are some questions that are central to the Gospel. For example, the statement that good works is preaching the Gospel actually subverts the Gospel. It makes good works for the benefit of others the goal of the Gospel. Thus the ultimate “good” of the good news becomes humanity, or society, but not God. Indeed, it is a close cousin of another false belief that says we are justified by our good works.

This is a central disagreement, where questions of baptism, the tribulation, the sequence and relative value of Spiritual giftings, (while important) are not.

Discerning between the two, using the witness of scripture in the unity of the Church (meaning the company of believers now and throughout history), is proper theology. In essence, theology is about discerning the accuracy of the Gospel we preach. In this sense it is important.

I was little surprised then when the same man claimed then that theology wasn’t that important overall, or that it was too academic. Indeed, bad theology is that, though I would say that he was engaging in that version of theology as we spoke. He was choosing to interpret the revelation of God in a way that ignored the center of the Gospel. He was engaged in bad theology. Had it been good theology, he would have taken the time to question whether what he was saying accorded with scripture. That is good theology, and so far from being academic, it is at the crux of a pastor’s work.

Good theology, the theology that is completely Biblical (meaning using the whole of scripture), helps the pastor to preach the Gospel rightly. That is intensely practical for people in congregations, as it is only the Gospel of Jesus Christ that saves.

We are primarily messengers, and only theologians insofar as it makes us better messengers. We dare not reverse those, as if the message serves only our own private theology, we end up preaching a lie.

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Atheism, Culture, Ethics, Philosophy, Rant, theology

Humility and Epistemology

This post is a result of several things, including a conversation with a friend and a post on John Stackhouse’s blog (found here).

The main reason for this post, though is not quite Stackhouse’s point (which I believe to be true), but an implication that I believe makes it far easier to remain truly Christian in the standard debates that surround being a Christian among thinking non-believers (by far my favorite kind of non-believers).

It is easy to get wrapped up in the certainty of our own faith (and don’t get me wrong, I am quite convinced that Jesus Christ really is the truth) so much that we come to believe that it is not Christ who saves people, but our own ideas of Christ that do. This is, to be frank, idolatry, and a fairly subtle form of it, made far more dangerous by its subtlety.

It is this idolatry that leaves Christians unable to actually hear the critiques brought against our faith, and in so doing be able to respond as Christ would have us respond, humbly and in the grace the Spirit provides. It is also dangerous because it has at its centre a resounding lie. One that can slowly eat away at the over-certain believer and leave their faith either rank hypocrisy, or non-existent (and provide a similarly overconfident disbelief). I mean, seriously, how does anyone with any experience of being incorrect ever assume that they cannot still be incorrect? I seem to remember the Magnificat having something to say about God scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

It is my contention that the faith a Christian is to have is less arrogant, but every bit as strong (perhaps stronger as it is not based on my own epistemic ability). We are called to point to the God that is truth, to seek that truth with all we are, with the full recognition that we are fallible, but trusting that God will lead us into truth if we are willing to see it. Indeed, God may be gracious to open our eyes where we have been blind to something till now.

Could I be wrong? Sure. Am I? Well, if I thought I was, I’d change my beliefs to something I think more closely accords to reality. The fact that we “could be wrong” does not prove that we in fact are, but leads us to remain on the path in seeking truth (as long as we don’t raise the “could be wrong” to “probably are”, the latter being as silly as unwarranted certainty in what we believe).
Most importantly, this allows us to see those who disagree with us as no more “foolish” than we see ourselves. It puts our knowledge as as much a function of grace as is our salvation, and it idiotic to pretend that what we are given by grace is a reason to deride another. Similarly, it allows us to speak, act, and preach what we have become convinced of.

Of course, as with everything, I stand ready to be corrected. :-)

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Rant

15 minutes of fame over

Well, It had to happen sooner or later, the Google Search no longer sees my blog at the top, and so my daily hits have gone back down to their normal levels.

S’too bad, with the semester ending I was soon going to have time to actually blog again, though I’ll be happy to no longer raise the ire of the more rabid and illogical atheists.

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Rant

Cloaking meaning

Seminary is probably going to be bad for my respect of clergy, especially those of the more mainline groups. Today I had an entire class in which we effectively danced around the Gospel message without ever really talking about it. This was strange since the class was about conflict management, and well, the greatest source of conflict for a Christian is the preaching of the actual Gospel.

In a roundabout way, the class was a good example. In the room are many people from many different points of view concerning the truth of Jesus Christ as savior of the world. The professor doubtless wanted to avoid discussing something that would no doubt lead to conflict, but the result was that the conflict that comes from telling people the truth about the world (as we wingnut fundies see the world) was simply ignored, even as we alluded to the Gospel.

It’s amazing how much people can say about the Gospel without ever saying it.  

Someday I’d like to hear unequivocal speaking from leading clergy in this diocese. I’m probably not going to see it, since the avoidance conflict is the goal here, not the spread of the Gospel. The result is that I’m going tokeep seeing a Church that lies about Jesus Christ through the hypocracy of cloaked words, rather than speaking the message of life.

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Culture, Rant, theology

The Non-Ideologically Driven Church?

20050826132126_church-exterior-in-the-20s.jpg “People aren’t ideologically driven.”

Sounds like  a pretty smart statement, doesn’t it? It was a statement I heard in a recent class on Church planting when we were discussing the way in which people choose Churches. It was said that people never seem to be interested in the things preached from the pulpit, rather in the community the Church represented; the way people acted towards each other.

Huh!

My difficulty is that, while the observation about what people openly value about a Church community is not the preaching, the teaching, or the doctrinal convictions of the Church is a good one, it is not correct to then think that people are not ideologically driven. Indeed, I’d actually say that the evidence leads to an opposite understanding.

First off, everybody is driven in some sense by ideology. We act based on what we actually believe to be true. Indeed, even in those cases where we don’t, it is our own beliefs about what the standards of our actions should be that make us believe that we have acted poorly at a given point. We do not always reflect on the ideology we have, but we always act on it.

It is this assumption that bases the actions of people in seeking a Church based on how they act with one another. They are looking to see what the Church ACTUALLY believes as opposed to what they say they believe. Any group of people can come up with nice words to state what they believe, but those words will remain words unless they are actually brought into the life of the Church community.

I remember being part of a Church organization that often said all the right things, but when it came right down to it, there was precious little in the way of actually teaching those things to people to the level that they began to act as if the things they were saying were true. The result was that while the first blushes of good community began to develop, there was no root for it, as people were not allowing the truth being expressed to embed upon the heart and then change them. To use the theological language, while they had a good understanding of justification (becoming right with God through Jesus Christ), they had a terrible understanding of sanctification (the altering of a person from the heart outward through the work of the Holy Spirit).

Contrary to popular belief, this was not a failure of action in the face of ideology, but a failure of ideology itself. The community in question had allowed in the tacit ideology that as long as one confessed Christ with their lips, and acted in vaguely loving ways, they were a Christian community. What was lacking was a belief in the work of the Holy Spirit as an agent for positive change in the life of the believer, a change that was not simply passive, but actually worked on the mind and heart to change them to be in conformity to Christ. The beliefs were incomplete, and as a result, the community eventually collapsed under its own inconsistent beliefs (and resultingly inconsistent actions).

When a person looks at a Church community, attempting to grade it’s value, they are not ignoring doctrine. Far from it. They are actually asking what doctrines actually move the Church. If they do not ALSO look at the official stated beliefs of the Church, and what is preached from the pulpit, they will get an incomplete picture, but they will not get a non-ideological picture.

The implication for the Church? While it is good to affirm in words that Jesus Christ is Lord, it is far better to then act like it, by loving God with all you have, and loving your neighbour as yourself. You can say all you like that you believe the word to be the word of God, it is quite another to bring your life humbly in submission to it.

In the end, God is not looking to create solely moral actors, or positive affirmers of good doctrine, or even passionate feelers of positive feelings towards God and others.  These are all effects. He seeks to recreate unregenerate man into worshipping vessels of His grace. We are being made into the image and likeness of Christ, a very total alteration, and seeking to stop at any point short of that, no matter which point, is going to be inadequate.

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