Master 242: Christian Doctrine Series, Part 1

Introduction.

Doctrine of the Word of God, part 1.

So I'm trying to lead my Sunday school class, at church, through a series on the major doctrines of the Christian faith. This has proven to be quite a challenge. As usual, the bulk of the challenge lies in the fact that there is such an extraordinary wealth of information on any one of the topics we take up. You could could run multiple college courses on even a single aspic of a given doctrine. And I'm trying to treat each of the doctrines in two or three forty-five minute sessions? Ridiculous!

Additionally, I'm trying to teach the material in such a way that the students can appreciate, more directly, the relevance of these doctrines to their lives. I've taken as a guiding principle (which might be obvious to some but I think it's at least worth making explicit) that the doctrines of the Christian faith only make sense if one takes seriously that what God intends and desires for those who follow Him is something quite radical. (Of course the details of that need to be filled in, but that's at least a helpful starting point.) There's a strong temptation, especially for long-time Christians, to settle for something less than God's best. We get the idea that being a decent, basically moral person is about the extent of what God requires and wants of us.

Francis Chan, opens the preface to his book, Crazy Love, with the following rhetorical question from Francois Fenelon's The Seeking Heart: 'To just read the Bible, attend church, and avoid "big" sins--is this passionate, wholehearted love for God?' C.S. Lewis also challenges this conventional view in his Mere Christianity. (See my blog post, Master 238: The Little Things.)

If you think that just getting a little bit of God into your life is what Christianity is all about, then the doctrines of the Christian faith aren't going to make sense to you. The Word of God. The Holy Spirit. The Church. The moments of salvation. Of course, building that background into any lesson is only going to add to the amount of material that you've got to convey.

It also strikes me that the major doctrines--at least in their more-or-less familiar formulations--did not spring up in a vacuum. I'm generally attracted to an historical approach to understanding ideas anyway, and it strikes me that the impetus for formulating the doctrines probably came from conflicts and debates that rose up over the course of the history of the church. The earliest followers of God might not have had anything as spelled out as a "Doctrine of the Word of God." They probably did not articulate the presuppositions that undergirded their practices of conscientiously studying and abiding by the words that God had spoken to them through the prophets and apostles over time. But when controversy arose--when someone wanted to add to the canon or developed clearly problematic views about the nature of inspiration or authority, then it became necessary to formulate the doctrines. Appreciating this historical context, I think, helps us to better appreciate the need for and importance of these doctrines, but, again, presenting this historical background requires still more time.

So that's the challenge that I'm dealing with. I haven't yet figured out how to resolve it, but I do often find that blogging is a helpful way for me to process ideas so I'm going to do that at least with this first doctrine--the doctrine of the Word of God. The complete list of doctrines that I would touch on are these:

Doctrine of the Word of God
Doctrine of God (esp. the Father)
Doctrine of Humankind (including the Fall)
Doctrine of Jesus Christ
Doctrine of the Holy Spirit
Doctrine of the Application of Redemption (i.e. Salvation)
Doctrine of the Church
Doctrine of the Future

Wayne Grudem, in his Systematic Theology defines a doctrine as "what the whole Bible teaches us today about some particular topic." (25) Given that definition, of course, it is possible to take up as doctrines much more narrowly-focused topics, but these at least pick out some of the most important points.

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Since I am a member of the Free Methodist Church, I will use their Articles of Religion as the backbone for my explorations of each doctrine. This is how paragraph 108 reads:

"The Bible is God's written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit. It bears unerring witness to Jesus Christ, the living Word. As attested by the early church and subsequent councils, it is the trustworthy record of God's revelation, completely truthful in all it affirms. It has been faithfully preserved and proves itself true in human experience.

"The Scriptures have come to us through human authors who wrote, as God moved them, in the languages and literary forms of their times. God continues, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, to speak through this Word to each generation and culture.

"The Bible has authority over all human life. It teaches the truth about God, His creation, His people, His one and only Son, and the destiny of humankind. It also teaches the way of salvation and the life of faith. Whatever is not found in the Bible nor can be proved by it is not to be required as an article of belief or as necessary to salvation." (Free Methodist Book of Discipline, 2007)

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How should one approach teaching the doctrine of the Word of God? Of course, one could just read off a set of propositions and leave it at that. "The Bible is God's written Word, uniquely inspired by the Holy Spirit", etc., etc. But what's the motivation for articulating the doctrine in this way? And what hangs on the truth or falsity of these propositions. Many people are far too used to their Christian experience being filled with lots of propositions that they do not understand but that they are told they must affirm or else suffer the consequences. But what are those consequences? In his synopsis of Bible doctrine, Charles Rylie lists nine different theories of biblical inspiration. What hangs on accepting one rather than another?

Taking this as our approach to understanding the doctrines is, I suspect, not going to be very helpful for us. It won't do to just present all nine theories of inspiration, list their various pros and cons, evidences for and against, and then pick one. That's certainly not how the "inspiration" component of the doctrine of the Word of God developed through the course of history. Another problem with approaching this doctrine in this way is that such an approach fails to draw a clear connection between adopting the correct theory of inspiration (for instance) and actually meeting with God in the biblical text. In connection with this point, some might point out that it is possible to hold, intellectually, what is widely believed to be a false theory of inspiration and still encounter God in the text. (And I'd be willing to grant that this is possible.) But this suggests that what theory of inspiration one holds is irrelevant to whether or not one can meet with God in the text.

At this point, I've only introduced this language of "meeting God in the text" without saying what that means. I'll clarify that later, but want to at least place that idea in our minds as one of the principle aims of Bible study. The Word of God was given to us not just to convey information or tell us about historical events or give us a series of models to either follow or eschew. The Word of God, more fundamentally, offers a venue in which the seeking person can be certain of meeting God. But already, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

What should we take as the guiding question that will help us to make sense of the various parts of this doctrine and its relevance to the Christian life as a whole? Here's one suggestion: What must we believe about this text and in what ways should we approach this text, so as to make sense of and share in the experiences of the men and women who guided their lives by this text? Let me clarify what I'm aiming at in this question. The men and women whose stories we find recorded in the Bible enjoyed a certain kind of relationship with God and experienced many things in the course of their interactions with Him. Their experiences serve as a model for us today. Their interactions with God provide guidance and clues for how we should approach God and what we can expect from Him. Some of this material will be taken up when we talk about the doctrine of God.

Some of their experiences involved reading and acting in accordance with the written word of God. When the Torah said to do something and they did it, God responded in certain ways. When the Torah said to do something and they didn't do it, God responded in other ways. But this kind of interaction doesn't just reveal something about God. It also reveals something about His word. The Torah, apparently, provided reliable insight into God's desire and will for His people, because when the people obeyed or disobeyed the words of Torah, God reacted as if they were obeying or disobeying Him. The sensible thing to say is that God wrote down His will for His people. He gave them the Torah.

Now, right there, you get certain familiar elements of the doctrine of the Word of God. We could talk about the authority of the Torah, the inspiration of the Torah, and the canon of the Torah. This is the kind of approach that we want to take when assessing the characteristics of the word of God as a whole. I first framed our guiding question in this way: What must we believe about this text and in what ways should we approach this text, so as to make sense of and share in the experiences of the men and women who guided their lives by this text? But as I continue to reflect, it strikes that this formulation is a bit too subjectivist. So let's rephrase the guiding question: What must be the character or nature of this text, such that (1) it had the impact that it did on the lives of the men and women who interacted with it and (2) we can expect to share in those experiences by so interacting with it? To put the question in slightly simpler form: What explains the impact that the Bible had and continues to have in the lives of the people who abide(d) in it?

If the explanation of the Bible's impact is that it is the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God, then, if we want to be similarly impacted we should approach the text in that way--as the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God.

Here we're still summarizing the main points and we'll get into some of the details later (although this is already proving to be immensely helpful for me). The next natural question that, I think, arises is: What happens if we fail to approach the Bible in this way. And here's one big problem with the way that many people, I think, try to make sense of the doctrine of the Word of God. Many people think that failing to approach the Bible as the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God just means failing to affirm a particular proposition about the character of the word of God. But that leads to an unfortunate caricature of God and His way of revealing Himself.

We might imagine to people: Angela and Bernard. Angela believes that the Bible is the inerrant, inspired, authoritative word of God. Bernard is like Angela except that He denies inerrancy. Now if we think that the crucial difference between these two is just that one affirms and one denies a certain proposition, then we can come away with the goofy idea that God is supposed to speak to Angela through His word and not to Bernard just because of what one believes and the other doesn't. God sits up in heaven and observes, "Angela believes that the Bible is inerrant so I will reveal Myself to her. Bernard denies that the Bible is inerrant so I will not reveal Myself to him." Is that why affirming or denying inerrancy is so important? Certainly not! But this is the kind of caricatured picture that, I suspect and fear, plagues many Christians who have been taught the doctrine of the Word of God only as a set of propositions without properly relating them to our life and walk with God.

What is the better way of thinking about the problem of denying inerrancy? (And I realize that I haven't yet tried to articulate just what inerrancy amounts to. Just go along with me for now. I'll take that up later.) Why is it that the person who denies inerrancy should not expect to share in the experiences of those men and women throughout history who have committed themselves to abiding in the word of God? Answer: Because the person who denies inerrancy will be inclined to reject, ignore, and revise what they take to be errors in the Bible. If, indeed, the Bible is inerrant, than the person who thinks that the Bible contains errors will tend to ignore passages that he or she takes to be erroneous. If the Bible is inerrant, than the person who chooses to ignore those passages will probably act and live in ways inconsistent with God's revealed will and intention. And the person who lives in ways inconsistent with God's revealed will and intention cannot expect to enjoy the same kinds of experiences and relationships as the person who does act in accordance with God's revealed will and intention.

Now you may not, at this point, believe that the Bible is inerrant or have an opinion one way or another, but I hope that you can see why the inerrancy of Scripture matters and why it makes a difference. It makes a difference, not because having the wrong doctrinal beliefs automatically puts us on the wrong side of God, but because having wrong doctrinal beliefs opens us up to acting in ways contrary to God's will and inconsistent with His character. And if you take seriously that acting in accordance with God's will and character is important, failing to do so looks like a big problem.

Believing that the Bible is inerrant doesn't involve just believing a proposition. (e.g. "The Bible is inerrant--true!) Rather, believing that the Bible is inerrant involves a readiness to submit one's life to the directions revealed in Scripture. It involves actually being guided by the Words of Scripture--not picking some to follow and discarding others, saying that some are true and judging that others are not. And the latter sort of belief is what will reinforce conviction in the proposition, because one will enjoy the experience of actually meeting God in the text and in one's life as one faithfully follows Him.

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At this point, having summarized my main approach, I actually think I'll take up some of the details in a separate entry. There's quite enough to think about in this entry as it is.

Again, all the usual caveats and qualifications apply. As I explore this topic just a little, I'm struck by the chasm that separates my lay-speculations from the work of professional theologians. Hopefully what comes out here will at least be a bit helpful. Until next time, then.

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Master 241: Writing style

I'm a pretty self-conscious writer, I think. That may not be a good thing. That often means that it takes me an inordinately long time to write things. The process of writing and revising and revising and revising can be rather arduous. Because of this, it's interesting to notice patterns in my writing--especially patterns that I didn't consciously adopt, but which seem to reflect very definite values and ways of seeing the world.

The pattern that I want to highlight here is a tendency to couple things together a lot. A-and-B. C-and-D. Take, as an example, the following excerpt from the essay from my application to teach at APU.

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I believe, not only that studying philosophy is worthwhile as one way of loving God and living with Him in His kingdom and world, but also that it is helpful and relevant to the general task of growing and maturing disciples. (Connected with this second point) I think that one strong impetus for philosophical inquiry comes from the experience of cultures and worldviews in conflict. Anyone presented with such a plethora of perspectives and value-systems as we find in contemporary western culture must wonder, as many have wondered throughout history, whether there is a way to know the truth about what is most real, what is good, and how best to live life. In most cases, I fear, failure to engage intentionally with these questions results just in one's unreflectively accepting some jumbled assortment of answers received from the loudest and most pervasive cultural voices. For many who would be disciples and followers of Jesus Christ, then, part of that journey will consist in taking some time to carefully consider these foundational questions. Careful study of the long tradition that has engaged with these issues and the exercise in critical thinking that comes from such study are both extremely useful for equipping students to engage with these topics; and they are both central focuses of philosophy courses.

If, as I think, both philosophy and Christian discipleship have to do with training in how to think about and approach life and the world, what does an integrated approach to such training, carried out in the philosophy classroom, look like and consist in? Some of it will consist in direct engagement with the 'big questions' and their various answers, many of which have been articulated by men and women seeking to honor God and walk in the way of Jesus Christ. Some of it will consist in my displaying an integrated approach to philosophy and academic scholarship. Prayer, for instance, has become an increasingly important part of my own approach to studying and writing philosophy. So it would make sense for me to open lectures by praying and invoking the Holy Spirit. But underlying all of these particular means, I take it, is the truth that the extent to which my students will encounter Jesus in my classroom depends, to a significant degree, on the condition of my own walk and relationship with God. As I seek to grow and abide increasingly in the love of the Father, the grace of Jesus Christ, and the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, my students will come to know Him better and better.

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At least some of the couples are importantly contentful. For instance, "(1) Careful study of the long tradition that has engaged with these issues and (2) the exercise in critical thinking that comes from such study". That I list two rather than one item here is important for the point that I am making in the essay.

On the other hand, I was able to identify at least seventeen couples that are not or are less contentful. The point, in other words, could be made using one rather than two elements and sometimes the coupling might appear to be something like inconsequential repetition or qualification:

loving God and living with Him
kingdom and world
helpful and relevant
growing and maturing
cultures and worldviews
perspectives and value-systems
loudest and most pervasive
disciples and followers
think about and approach
life and the world
look like and consist in
honor God and walk in the way of Jesus Christ
philosophy and academic scholarship
studying and writing
praying and invoking the Holy Spirit
walk and relationship
grow and abide

Why mention two things when only one seems like it would suffice. Why talk about perspectives and worldviews? Why distinguish between walk and relationship? Is the really a difference between being helpful and being relevant? And why crowd the essay with all these extra conjunctions?

Maybe you think that having the two actually does make a significant difference. If that's the case, then you're probably seeing things along the same lines as myself. I take it that this pattern reflects a tendency in my own thought-life to envision things as always being more and richer than we can capture with words. Some people might think that loving God just is the same thing as living with Him, but if I were to use only one of those designations, I would be left with the unhappy sense that I had inadequately or inaccurately represented the thing that I was trying to talk about. How can you capture the idea of "loving God" with just that phrase. Those two words are clearly inadequate. The solution? Add more words. Identify every phenomenon or activity with two expressions--closely related but slightly varied in meaning so that the reader comes away with the sense that we are talking about something that is related to both but not identical with either of them.

Does the point come across? What do you think? Are there other patterns in my writing that you see? Fun stuff.

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.

Master 240: Why study philosophy?

I interviewed last week to teach as an adjunct at Azusa Pacific University. One of the things we talked about in that interview was the challenge of motivating undergraduates (and people in general) to take the project of philosophy seriously. Particularly since it often seems to engage questions and topics that are so far removed from the exigencies of daily life, how can we help students to appreciate the value of studying and doing philosophy? Philosophy of science? Logic? Epistemology? Theories of truth? Dualism vs. materialism vs. idealism? Why ought a student to study these things or why would it be worthwhile for a student to study these things?

After talking about this a bit in my interview, I happened to glance through the first chapter of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. In that chapter, I think Screwtape does a nice job of clarifying the choice that we (humans) have before us. Of course, he's focusing on keeping Wormwood's patient from Christianity--not keeping undergrads out of philosophy. But I actually think there are strong parallels and connections between the two projects.

So I invite you to read Screwtape's first letter. (The bold-facing is mine. The italics are original.) Then ask yourself whether it might not be important to take at least some time to think about the 'big questions'.

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My dear Wormwood,

I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or 'practical', 'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous--that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'.

Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defense by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said 'Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning,' the patent brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added 'Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind,' he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of 'real life' (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all 'that sort of thing' just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about 'that inarticulate sense of actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic'. He is now safe in Our Father's house.

You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable 'real life'. But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he know it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is 'the results of modern investigation'. Do remember you are there fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

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Of course I'm not suggesting that everybody ought to think about the philosophical or the abstract all the time. I don't even think that most people should think about that stuff most of the time. But I think probably everybody needs to think about the philosophical at some time, especially given our contemporary pluralistic, relativistic culture.

If you have never taken the time to think about the presuppositions that you take for granted and the worldview that informs your way of understanding your life and the world around you, that's probably not because you happened, by accident, to fall into a way of making sense of the world that's consistent, coherent, and sensible. Most people, I suspect (and fear), who have never thought about what they really believe, and whether that body of beliefs makes sense, have probably just unreflectively fallen into patterns of life that echo what the loudest voices around them tell them. And we all know, I hope, that the loudest voice isn't always the right voice.

So, do undergraduates have a vested interest in taking their philosophy classes seriously, even if doing so doesn't have an immediate, 'practical' pay-off? Well, let me put the question in a more 'loaded' way: is better or worse for undergraduates to be the pawns of Wormwood's schemes?

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.