So here’s  a bit of a pop quiz for you.  You’re in a restaurant.  You’re looking at the menu.  Toward the bottom corner you see a list of beverages including Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, root beer.  What’s the generic name for this type of beverage?  And don’t say “soft drink” because no one says that any more than anyone refers to “Kleenex” as “facial tissue.”

How many of you say “soda?”  How many of you say “pop?”  If you’re from Texas, you might call all of them “coke,” which means if you order a “coke” in a restaurant, don’t be surprised when the wait staff asks you “what kind?”

This isn’t the only example, of course.  We can name several other examples of words that get pronounced differently depending on where you’re from:

• Is “aunt” pronounced like “ant” or like “ahnt?”
• Is “caramel” two syllables (“CAR-mel”) or three (“CARE-ah-mel”)?
• Is “coupon” pronounced more like “coop” or more like the word “cute?”
• Is “route” pronounced like “root” or should it rhyme with “out?”
• Do you call the symbol (*) as “asterisk” or an “asteriks”?

And of course there’s more.  In 1999 Harvard surveyed folks from across the country to catalog the many ways we pronounce things differently depending on our region of origin.  More recently, The New York Times used the same data to create a quiz that claims it can determine where you’re from based on your pronunciation and regional vocabulary (I’ve actually given this to you before, but if you’re bored you can click here to take the quiz).

Here’s the point: if our environment shapes our speech and our accent, what else might our environment be shaping?

LEARNING AND ABIDING

Christian learning, as we’ve said, is about the formation of our character.  None of us are immune to this process.  I think of the repeated theme from Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow about how we sink into a place, and how that place sinks into us.  We cannot reduce ourselves to mere products of our environment, but we can hardly deny the incredible power our environment has on our learning and our character.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus so often used the metaphor of “abiding” or “remaining.”  The word most literally has the idea of “dwelling,” the way we might “abide” in a house or region.  But used by Jesus, the word refers to the way that discipleship is an immersion process, and that our “fruitfulness” depends on the way that we unite with Christ and his teachings by “sinking into” them, and allowing them to sink into us:

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. ² Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. ³ Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. ⁴ Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. ⁵ I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. ⁶ If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. ⁷ If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. ⁸ By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. ⁹ As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. ¹⁰ If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. ¹¹ These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. (John 15:1-11)

The thing is, everybody “abides” in something.  We “sink into” something.  And we will learn from what we abide in—it will shape us and mold us so that we speak the “regional dialect” of whoever’s kingdom we choose to “abide” in.

If you sink into social media, social media will sink into you.  If you sink into your smart phone, your smart phone will sink into you.  That is, if you sink into convenience, then it is convenience—and not vibrant relationship—that will sink into you.  So if you sink into career, sex, money, you name it—these things will sink into you.  No one “dabbles” in these things like they were some sort of hobby.  They will shape you, mold you until you may not like the outcome.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON WORSHIP

We’re talking, then, about the radical unity between worship and learning.  Worship is about the formation and expression of our loves.  And what we love, we look at, and what we look at, we become.  Paul had something of this in mind when he turned his focus to Christ’s followers in the final portion of his letter to the Romans.  In the previous sections of his letter (what we know as chapters 1-11), Paul address topics ranging from sin (Romans 1-3), salvation (Romans 4-6), sanctification (Romans 7-8) and God’s sovereignty (Romans 9-11).  Now Paul starts his address on service by saying:

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. ² Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:1-2)

In a recent song by the band Mumford and Sons, the singer intones that “in these bodies we live, in these bodies we will die.  Where you invest your love, you invest your life.”  For years I never quite understood the connection between the two verses above—they seemed so disconnected to my mind.  But I think Paul was trying to tell us that our lives are about worship—about our loves—and only through total surrender to God can we be expect to be molded and shaped into someone that resembles God’s Son (Romans 8:29).

So in verse 2 Paul contrasts these two ideas of being “conformed to this world” and being “transformed by the renewal of your mind.”  Make no mistake: Paul was way ahead of his time.  It’s only been recently that research has begun to challenge the former assumptions that the human brain doesn’t change.  It does—sometimes drastically.  The learning process is about forming new connections between parts of the brain to improve communication and literally change the way you think.  Positively, this helps explain why it’s better for children to learn new languages when they’re young—because then this new vocabulary becomes better integrated into the developing network of brain cells.  Negatively, this explains why pornography can be so devastating—because it literally alters the wiring of the user’s brains until genuine intimacy becomes impossible.

We are either transformed or conformed.  Sometimes I think we tend to get wrapped up in the question of whether certain behaviors or certain media choices are sinful or not.  Because the answer isn’t always immediately obvious.  But maybe we can ask a better question.  Maybe we should be asking: Which way is my heart slanted?  In other words, will this behavior “slant” my heart more toward God and my neighbor, or will this behavior “slant” my heart more toward myself?

So, for instance:

• When I use my smart phone as the sole means of communicating with others, does this slant my heart toward genuine love for them, or does it slant my heart toward relating to people only when it is convenient?
• Do my choices of music and media slant my heart toward loving God’s kingdom and its values, or slant my heart toward loving values that only serve the self?
• Does my attitude toward my job—my work ethic, my treatment of my co-workers, etc.—slant my heart toward living out God’s mission in the everyday, or does it slant my heart toward using my career to make myself feel good or look good in the eyes of others?
• Do the quick meals we have with our kids slant them toward finding God’s presence even in the mundane lulls before soccer practice, or do they slant their hearts toward seeing life as an endless rush to “the next thing?”

All of these things activities (and others) are part of a larger learning process.  Just as our environment can shape our speech, so too can our surroundings and our habits shape our hearts.

The gospel isn’t about earning God’s approval through righteous behavior.  God’s approval comes only through the righteousness of Jesus applied to your account through his finished work on the cross.  But God is determined to engage us in an ongoing work of personal transformation.  This transformation comes about not merely by conforming to a set of moral standards, but by re-aligning our loves—the things we “abide” in—such that they reflect Christ and his kingdom more than our worldly empires.

So what about you?  What are you doing today?  What will it teach you?  How will it shape you?  Which way is your heart slanted?

When I was a little kid my favorite movie was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  I was mildly obsessed.  I watched—and re-watched—the movie countless times, rewinding the VHS tape (yes; I grew up in the era of VHS) at least a thousand times.

But of course I was never content to simply watch the movie.  I wanted to live the movie.  I imagined that the entire house was a submarine, and I was its captain.  I’m pretty sure I decided that my mother was the ship’s cook, so I don’t know that I was the most progressive captain in the world, but I guess when you’re four you gotta start somewhere.

Now that I’m older I’ve come to recognize just how important it is for children to participate in the things they love, the way that my nephew loves to emulate the action heroes from Big Hero Six or the rescuers from Paw Patrol or whatever.  Children don costumes and capes, clamoring “up, up, and away!” as they rush off in search of adventure, to say nothing of the diverse ways that girls emulate their own heroines ranging from Disney princesses to  the bold Rey from Star Wars. 

Imagination, then, isn’t just about creating fanciful worlds and mental pictures.  Imagination has to do with giving life to these stories and crafting ways that we inhabit these stories, allow them to become us, and to give ourselves to these stories that we might find meaning.

SEE, DO, TEACH

Our focus this week has been on learning, which we defined yesterday as the process of allowing God’s story to shape our character.  We need to challenge the deeply-held assumption that learning is about the assimilation of information rather than the formation of character.

In David Brooks’ bestselling The Social Animal, the journalist explores the ways that contemporary brain research helps us understand the learning process.  He points out that we often assume that the learning process is like pouring liquid into a container.  In reality, he says, quoting from one psychologist, “the process is ‘like a blender left running with the lid off.  The information is literally sliced into discrete pieces as it enters the brain and splattered all over the insides of the mind.’”[1]  The learning process is about connecting those “splattered” pieces into something meaningful.  Brooks points out that this means that you don’t have a part of your brain devoted to remembering things like the distinction between the letter “P” and the letter “B.”  In fact, this simple distinction involves something like 22 different sections of the human brain.

That’s interesting enough, I guess, but what does this have to do with children playing?  When children use their imaginations, they are forming connections between various pieces of information.  Play helps children develop social skills and moral centers—it’s the way that children first learn to make sense of the world around them.

But this also means something for adults as well.  The learning process, as we just said, isn’t about getting more information into our heads.  It’s about learning to take that information and make it a part of our character and skill set.

Medical schools already know this.  In an article for Spin.com, Brian Ledsworth tells us that medical schools emphasize three crucial steps to learning:[2]

• Seeing
• Doing
• Teaching

In Christianity, we often stop at the first step.  We do a lot of “seeing” or passive listening—to sermons, to books, to podcasts, even to Bible study—but we rarely move on from there and incorporate what we’re learning into our daily practices, let alone passing it on to others.

HEART, SOUL, STRENGTH: CONNECTIVE LEARNING

The people of the Bible would have probably found this threefold approach (see, do, teach) really weird.  Or at least unnecessary.  When we read the pages of Scripture, we don’t find a division between these three categories.  Rather, we can point out that seeing, doing, teaching are all part of a learning process that engaged the whole person—not just his or her mind.

In the pages of Deuteronomy, we find a celebration between God and his people, a celebration that resembled the proceedings of many ancient treaties, but would today be most similar to the “big tent revival” services of Christianity’s recent past. Here we find God issuing a paradigm of learning that would define much of Israelite community for generations to come:

“Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the rules—that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, ² that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. ³ Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.

⁴ “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. ⁵ You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. ⁶ And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. ⁷ You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. ⁸ You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. ⁹ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:1-9)

It may be helpful to unpack verse 5 a bit, because the terms “heart,” “soul,” and “might” mean something a bit different to us than the people for whom this passage was written:

• “Heart” (from the Hebrew lebab): Our understanding of “heart” has unfortunately been shaped by things ranging from Greek philosophy to Hallmark commercials. But the Hebrews would have understood lebab as meaning something a bit more like “mind” or “intellect,” the center of thought, not emotion.
• “Soul” (from the Hebrew nephesh): The term nephesh literally means “life,” and refers to the innermost part of a person—his will, his motivations, his identity.
• “Might/strength” (from the Hebrew me’od): This term relates to “obedience” and practices—it’s the active, physical dimension of things, the way we embody God’s story in our world.

We’ll unpack some of this further in the days ahead, but what I want us all to really be aware of is that God’s plan for “Christian education” engages the whole person.  I know it doesn’t quite overlap with the “see, do, teach” of today’s medical school, but surely we can see some parallels.

Here’s the larger point: we too easily fall into the trap of assuming that Christian teaching—its theology, its doctrines—is something you absorb by listening to a sermon or participating in a Bible study.  It’s not.  Sure, it may start there.  After all, there’s value in hearing God’s word taught to you on a regular basis.  But Christianity isn’t about learning a story as much as living a story.  It’s less about the intellect but the imagination—that is, the part of our brains that leads us to inhabit God’s story and see it unfold in all its gracious possibilities.  Theology should challenge us, but it should also excite us, it should move us and animate us like children at play.  We will never flourish until we see the ways that God’s story intersects with all of life, and learn our own place in the webbing together of truth and practice.  Christianity needs thinkers, yes, but more than that it needs playful thinkers, men and women who participate in God’s story in every moment of their lives.  We need poets, we need artists, we need mothers, we need fathers, we need sportsmen, we need hunters, we need mechanics and scientists and musicians and most of all we need men and women whose hearts and homes and jobs overflow with the goodness of God in the everyday, and see God’s story as not confined to a book (as precious as that book is!) but taking shape in the everyday moments that make up our lives.

So grab your cape.  Let your imagination run wild.

[1] John Medina, quoted in David Brooks, The Social Animal, p. 81.

[2] Brian Ledsworth, “See one, do one, teach one: Not just for the medical profession,” April 29, 2011 http://spin.atomicobject.com/2011/04/29/see-one-do-one-teach-one-not-just-for-the-medical-profession/

In the age of information, the creation of an “artificial intelligence” has been something of a holy grail for computer programmers.  I don’t know why, exactly—frankly I think we already have a deficit of “natural intelligence.”  But I digress.

In the past year, the Microsoft corporation released a program known as a “chatbot” on the world.  What is a chatbot?  A chatbot, apparently, is a computer program designed to simulate a human being.  You can send a message to this chatbot, and get a reply.  And because the communication is all digital, you have no way of distinguishing the messages from the chatbot from any of the other messages we exchange in the age of digital networks.

So Microsoft designed a program named “Tay,” designed to emulate the communication patterns of a 19-year-old girl, and released her into Twitter—the popular social networking site.

The results were disastrous.  According to The Guardian:

“The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become “smarter” as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users fed the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday.”[1]

Microsoft had to pull Tay from the internet within only 16 hours, saying that they are “deeply sorry” for releasing her on the world.

I’m not a computer programmer, but I’d guess that the human mind works quite differently from that of a machine or a program.  But I think Tay reveals a valuable lesson, namely that our environment shapes us in more ways that we realize.  Our character is influenced—perhaps strongly—by the sum of our relationships and our habits.

WHY LEARN?

This week we’re looking at the question: “Why learn?”  The answer, revealed in part by Tay, is that we are all learners.  From cradle to grave, all of us learn without necessarily being conscious of it.  Learning, in the Christian sense, is less about information and more about formation.  “Men are made, not born Christians,”[2] wrote one of the writers of the ancient church, and because of the effects of sin we need a gracious re-shaping of our character that we might fulfill our destiny of being “conformed to the image of [the] Son” (Romans 8:29).

Here at Tri-State we do many things with that aim:

• Sermons (including those on our Youtube channel)
• Online devotionals
• Classes (such as those during “second hour,” though also our children’s ministry)
• Small groups (including our community groups and youth groups)

And of course we could add to this list some of the various projects and ministry events that arise in the course of a year.  These activities serve to help us learn, help us grow, help shape us into men and women who serve as active members of God’s kingdom.

But how?

WHERE IS WISDOM FOUND?

Biblical scholars usually lump together the poetic books under the heading of “wisdom literature,” referring to Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon.  But if one book stands out as being about “wisdom” more than others, it is the book of Proverbs.  The book is a collection of poetic phrases and sayings (kind of like King Solomon’s Twitter account), and while the form of the book resembles the poetry of other ancient people (notably Egypt), Solomon anchors his teaching in the character of Israel’s one true God:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.  (Proverbs 1:7)

The Church exists to worship God—to place him at the center of our lives and to reveal him as the exulted King of all Creation.  In doing so, our character is shaped and molded that we might grow in wisdom.

What is “wisdom?”  The word in Hebrew is hokma, meaning something more like “skill.”  It had more to do with actions than intellectual knowledge, though as we see above our English Bibles often translate hokma as “knowledge” or “wisdom” and use the terms interchangeably.  We might define wisdom as the “right use of knowledge,” emphasizing that wisdom has more to do with character than it does to mere information.

After all, it’s a distinctively modern, Western trend to separate knowledge from wisdom.  As we mentioned earlier, ours is an information age.  We are surrounded by—nay, bombarded by—information and data.  In such a world, one of the greatest social “sins” is to appear uninformed.  The “smart phone” is the closest thing to omniscience we’ll ever get to experience.  But we might join T.S. Eliot in his lament for the modern age: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”[3]

In his book The Divine Conspiracy, Christian author Dallas Willard writes of how the world is operating completely upside-down:

“Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard and a well-known researcher and commentator on matters social and moral, published a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on ‘The Disparity Between Intellect and Character.’ The piece is about ‘the task of connecting intellect to character.’ This task, he adds, ‘is daunting.’”[4]

He goes on to say that in a world devoid of true wisdom, our souls will cling to the kinds of cheap nonsense we find on bumper stickers and t-shirt slogans, things that “somehow seem deep but in fact make no sense: ‘Stand up for your rights’ … ‘All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten’…’Practice random kindnesses and senseless acts of beauty’…And so forth.”[5]

“But try instead ‘Stand up for your responsibilities’ or ‘I don’t know what I need to know and must now devote my full attention and strength to finding out’…or ‘Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.’ Putting these into practice immediately begins to bring truth, goodness, strength, and beauty into our lives. But you will never find them on a greeting card, plaque, or bumper. They aren’t thought to be smart. What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound.”[6]

I know many people who are knowledgeable.  I know many people who are clever.  I know far fewer who are deep and who are wise.

Solomon implores his readers—which would have included his own sons—that wisdom provides great benefit:

Get wisdom; get insight;
do not forget, and do not turn away from the words of my mouth.
6 Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you.

(Proverbs 4:5-6)

We are all learners.  We need to press ourselves beyond the shallow places that occupy our modern landscape and press ourselves deeply into the truths of Christ.  We need to be men and women who possess a wisdom beyond our years while never shedding the laughter of youth.  Most of all, we need the gracious gift of Godly wisdom, that others might see less of us and more of Him.

[1] “Microsoft ‘deeply sorry’ for racist and sexist tweets by AI chatbot,” in The Guardian, March 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/26/microsoft-deeply-sorry-for-offensive-tweets-by-ai-chatbot

[2] Tertullian, The Apology, XVIII.

[3] T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, p. 147.

[4] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p. 3-4.

[5] Ibid., 9-10.

[6] Ibid., 10.

“Will this be on the test?”  Having gone to school for 20 years, I heard this question a lot from my fellow students.  Ok, actually I myself wondered this question a lot.  Higher education, as they say, is a lot like drinking from a fire hose.  It’s hard to always know what to focus on.  Sometimes it’s blatantly obvious.  I once had a professor in grad school who spent a full ten minutes describing the width of certain letters on the typewriter, and which Microsoft Word fonts retain this same width.  The person to my left leaned over and said, “This is weird.”

And it was.

Now maybe none of you would say it this way, but I might imagine that there are times when you sit in a church service (not one of ours…I’m talking about some other preacher) and think: “Do I really need to know this?”

That’s a loaded question, isn’t it?  By now we’ve tried to hammer home the importance and even beauty of Christian doctrine.  But many of us have had those experiences where doctrine seems to stir arguments or has fueled discussions that seem to be purely academic in nature.  After all, do we really need to settle the debate between Calvinists and Arminians or figure out whether we believe in pre-millenialism versus amillenialism?  I mean, really, how much do we need to know about these types of things?

The Church has historically offered this piece of advice: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”[1]  In other words, we stand firm in the Christian “essentials,” without splitting on non-essentials, and in all things we let love rule over our minds and our community.

So…what’s essential?

WHAT IS ESSENTIAL

We might answer our question with a question of our own: essential for what?  We can split this into three broad categories, which I’m borrowing from Michael Patton from his blog on theology (some of you have been through his thorough theology video series).[2]

• Beliefs that are essential for salvation.

These are the most basic Christian beliefs.  A Christian may obviously believe more than this list, but to believe less means that you are not in a saving relationship with God.

• Belief in God (there is no such thing as an atheistic Christian)
• Belief in Christ’s deity and humanity (1 John 4:2-3; Rom. 10:9)
• Belief that you are a sinner in need of God’s mercy (1 John 1:10)
• Belief that Christ died on the cross and rose bodily from the grave for our sins (1 Cor 15:3-4)
• Belief that faith in Christ is necessary (John 3:16)

Naturally, each of the above statements might have other beliefs attached to them, but these are the core, essential teachings of Christianity.

• Beliefs that are essential to be an orthodox Christian

By “orthodox” we mean someone who agrees with the distinctive beliefs of the Christian church.  This list would include the list above, but would also include some issues that don’t relate to salvation, but determine whether your thinking is in line with the Bible and what other Christians have historically believed.  This list would include (but would not be limited to):

• The doctrine of the Trinity as expressed at Nicea
• The doctrine of the Hypostatic Union (Christ is fully man and fully God) as expressed at Chalcedon
• The belief in the future second coming of Christ
• A belief in the inspiration and authority of Scripture
• A belief in God’s transcendence (his metaphysical distinction from the universe)
• A belief in God’s immanence (his present activity in the world and our lives)
• A belief in God’s sovereignty (while there are different ways to define sovereignty, this basically purports that God is in control)
• Belief that Christ is the only way to a right relationship with God
• Belief in eternal punishment of the unredeemed

In other words, denying any of the above ideas would certainly put you out of the stream of Christian thought, though I’d be reluctant to define the person outside of a relationship with God.  But because these doctrines are so important for traditional Christianity, they are important enough to stand up for—there should not be room to “agree to disagree,” as these doctrines have traditionally formed the shape of Christian belief.

• Beliefs that are essential to certain strands of Christian thought

I’m trying to refrain from calling these “non-essential,” because I don’t want you to hear the word “unimportant.”  These are the doctrines that often change between denominations or systems of Christian thought:

• Calvinism versus Arminianism (did God choose me based on his choice alone or because of my choice to follow him?)
• The exact timing of the events of Christ’s future return
• Authorship of particular books of the Bible
• The debate over creation and evolution
• Debates over Christian liberty in issues such as alcohol

Again, let’s not dismiss these as unimportant.  On some of the above ideas I hold a very strong view—and I can name people in our congregation who take the opposing view.  It’s just that these disagreements don’t serve to divide the Christian community.  Two people can be saved, orthodox Christians and be in complete disagreement over whether the rapture comes before or after the tribulation.  They can’t both be right.  But disagreeing is ok.  What we need is to cultivate a community of “gracious contention,” where we are free to discuss, to reason, to discover, and to love one another through such issues.

THE GOAL OF DOCTRINE

In his first letter to Timothy, Paul tells the young pastor that “the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5).  Theology has, as its highest aim, love for God and love for his people.

Nowhere is this love more fully expressed than in the person of Jesus.  In John’s introduction, he begins his biography of Jesus by observing that “no one has ever seen God,” but Jesus “has made him known” (John 1:18).  If you’re reading that in the original Greek, you find that the phrase “has made him known” comes from the single Greek word exegesato, which refers to scholars poring over ancient texts and stories to draw out a meaning.  John is telling us that Jesus is the embodiment of God’s story.

In their book The Jesus Manifesto, authors Frank Viola and Leonard Sweet pick up on this theme:

“Jesus does not leave his disciples with CliffsNotes for a systematic theology. He leaves his disciples with breath and body. Jesus does not leave his disciples with a coherent and clear belief system by which to love God and others. Jesus gives his disciples wounds to touch and hands to heal. Jesus does not leave his disciples with intellectual belief or a ‘Christian worldview.’ He leaves his disciples with a relational faith.”

The authors overstate their case a bit.  Room exists, I wager, for doctrine and thoughtful propositions.  But they are onto something quite basic and uniquely Christian.  If you read the works of other religious teachers, you find that Mohammad, Confucius, Buddha all had meaningful things to say, but—to quote St. Augustine—“I never heard them say, ‘Come unto me.’”  Other religions create a division between teaching and teacher.  Jesus alone says, I am the teaching.  I am God’s message.  Don’t just follow an idea.  Follow me.

So for Christianity, doctrine is more than a set of propositions, because truth is a person.  Truth has a body, and by devoting ourselves to Jesus we form a community of belief and a community of love.

[1] Rupertus Meldenius, quoted by Philip Schaff in History of the Christian Church, vol. 7, p. 650.

[2] For his full article, you might want to check out: http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2011/06/essentials-and-non-essentials-in-a-nutshell/

If there’s anything enviable about the younger generations today it’s that they have such a wide selection of Star Wars toys to play with.

Not long ago I went to a major department store and I was blown away by just the sheer volume of Star Wars merchandise—which had apparently spilled over from the toy aisles into literally everywhere else.  Among the selection are, of course, LEGO’s.  Here’s where I have to rant a little.  See, when I was a kid, there was no such thing as Star Wars LEGO’s. They didn’t come in pre-packaged sets like they do today, or at least not with a Star Wars theme.  No; they came in buckets of generically-shaped primary-color LEGO sets.  So my X-Wing was bright red and my TIE Fighters had to have rainbow-colored solar panels. And forget about instructions; I had to do it all myself.  I used to watch the space battle scenes from Return of the Jedi (on VHS, mind you) so I could get the right specifications of the A-Wing and B-Wing spacecraft.

Of course, all that nerdiness cultivated a strange sort of productivity and ingenuity.  You’d think that after all that I might have developed into something like a computer programmer or an engineer or at least the sort of person who could change his own oil.

Nah.

FAITH LIKE A CHILD

For all my sarcasm, here, you can’t really go back again.  At least not easily.  In David Brooks’ recent bestseller The Social Animal, he takes time to explain how the brain goes through various stages of development and how that affects our learning processes and social interactions.  He talks about Rob who tries to join his son Harold as he plays action figures with his friends:

“After about twenty minutes…Rob got the urge to join in….This was a big mistake.  It was roughly the equivalent of a normal human being grabbing a basketball and inviting himself to play a pickup game with the Los Angeles Lakers….[The children’s] imaginations danced while his plodded.  They saw good and evil while he saw plastic and metal.  After five minutes, their emotional intensity produced a dull ache in the back of his head.  He was exhausted trying to keep up.”[1]

I don’t have kids, but I know how awkward it can be for an adult to try and re-enter the world of childhood.  Brooks explains that this has to do with the fact that children don’t think the same way that adults do:

“…the game Harold and his buddies were playing relied on a different way of thinking, what [a psychologist named Emil Bruner] calls the ‘narrative mode.’ Harold and his buddies had now become a team of farmers on a ranch.  They had started doing things on it—riding, roping, building, and playing.  As stories grew and evolved, it became clear what made sense and what didn’t make sense within the line of the story.”[2]

Recently it’s occurred to me that the reason many people don’t like “doctrine” or “theology” is not because they find it dry or scholastic (though that may be an objection for some, as we addressed a bit yesterday), but because they struggle to understand how the various pieces and beliefs can fit together to form a cohesive whole—a story that explains, “what’s it all mean?”

We might therefore see “doctrine” as a set of LEGO’s.  If we think too much like “grown-ups,” we might miss the simple joy in putting the pieces together into something meaningful.  I don’t mean to suggest that doctrine is all about creativity—after all, there are some ideas that are true and others that are just plain wrong.  But when I read the Scriptures I find that there is a greater sense of connectedness to these ideas than we might first realize.

Doctrine, then, helps us “make something” of the world.[3]  By “make something” we mean this in two ways.  First, we “make something” of the world in the sense that we think through and make sense of it.  Second, we “make something” of the world in the sense that we allow our new understanding to propel us forward, that we might meaningfully contribute to the world as creators and agents of God’s kingdom.

This seems to be at the heart of what Paul says to Timothy in his letter to this young pastor:

¹⁶ All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷ that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

We can see here that Paul sees Scripture (and, by extension, the doctrines derived from it) as having a role in helping God’s people “make something” of the world.  First, because Scripture teaches, reproofs, and corrects, it shapes our intellectual understanding of how the world works and God’s role in it.  Second, doctrine helps us “make something” of the world in that it “trains” us “in righteousness,” so that we “may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

If we put these two things together, we see that doctrine isn’t merely about religious education.  Doctrine isn’t about a lecture hall; it’s about learning to…well, to “play” again—to  have “faith like a child” so that our imaginations might be simultaneously shaped by God’s master story even as we are set free to animate that story in our neighborhoods and families and workplaces and every other inch of creation that belongs to God.

FROM DISNEY TO DOCTRINE

What might this look like, at least on a practical, day-to-day level?  Well, since many of you folks have families, it might mean re-learning to enter the imagination of your children.  Any of you have little girls?  They’re probably still running around the house singing “Let it go…let it go…” until you want to pull your hair out.  But what does this mean, really?  Let’s return for a second to our “three big questions” from earlier:

• What is the world like?
• What should the world be like?
• How can the world be set right?

Do you think that when Elsa—the main character from Frozen—shrugs off her restrictive upbringing to build her own castle, that this says anything about these three questions?  Elsa is basically looking at these questions and saying:

• “The world is full of rules”
• “True happiness comes from freedom”
• “I can attain this happiness if I build my own castle out away from everyone”

And how does that go for Elsa?  How does that impact Anna?  How are things finally set right—what makes Elsa and Anna live happily ever after?

Those latter questions aren’t “Christianese.”  But you’re also not just talking about a Disney movie, either.  If you talk about these kinds of questions with your eight-year-old, you’re having a conversation about doctrine, about belief.  With enough practice, you can slowly learn to connect and compare the way that the world of Disney compares with the doctrines of the Bible.  All fairy tales, for example, elevate the role of self-sacrifice (which is a Christian virtue), though many also emphasize the need to “wish upon a star” and elevate personal happiness as a supreme virtue (which may clash with Christian understandings of sin and the need for a Savior).

I realize this isn’t immediately easy, but it doesn’t take a graduate degree either.  Doctrine helps us “make something” of our world, and it can help shape future generations as well.

[1] David Brooks, The Social Animal, p. 54-5.

[2] Ibid., 54.

[3] I’m borrowing this two-pronged metaphor from Andy Crouch’s recent book Culture Making.

So who invented Christianity?  These days it’s become fashionable to assume that Christ came and delivered a message of love, but then the Church twisted his teachings to reinforce their own sense of dominance and power.

If it makes you feel any better, Christianity isn’t the only target in this regard.  Writing for the New York Times, George Johnson tells the story of the 2015 protests in Honolulu over the installation of a new telescope.  Despite the fact that the mountain of Mauna Kea already had 13 other telescopes as part of a science reserve, the protestors insisted that this further addition would “desecrate a mountaintop where the Sky Father and Earth Mother gave birth to humankind.”  Never mind the fact that the protestors believed none of this to be true.  According to Johnson, they were really just worried about things like “Western colonialism” that seeks to “marginalize” other cultures—as if science is really superior over these primitive beliefs.  Johnson saw this as illustrating the fact that in today’s world, everything—whether religion or science—is assumed to be a social construct, a human invention:

“Viewed from afar, the world seems almost on the brink of conceding that there are no truths, only competing ideologies — narratives fighting narratives….those with the most power are accused of imposing their version of reality…on the rest, leaving the weaker to fight back with formulations of their own. Everything becomes a version.”[1]

Johnson’s article was appropriately titled, “The Widening World of Hand-picked Truths.”  As Christians, we believe that truth isn’t something we “pick” or decide or build ourselves.  Christianity isn’t something that men cooked up in a lab or a classroom someplace.  There is a givenness to doctrine—a gift from God to man so that man might learn to love God.  We see this all over scripture.  Both Paul and Peter affirmed that the truths of Scripture came through man, yes, but with God as its ultimate source:

²¹ For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:21)

¹⁶ All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness…” (2 Timothy 3:16)

Both Paul and Peter share a belief that scripture comes from God as the ultimate source.  Paul especially connects the act of God breathing to the act of man writing (“scripture,” here, comes from the Greek graphe meaning something written down), so we can’t escape the fact that the Bible represents the written expression of God’s character and will. Even the rituals of God’s people in the days before Jesus were not human inventions.  Speaking of the system of sacrifices, God tells Israel that “the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls” (Leviticus 17:11).  So even the language of “atonement” (that is, dealing with sin—the very doctrine that would later be fulfilled in the cross) comes not from some ancient social custom, but from something given from God to his people.

Now, of course it’s true that Christians since the days of Peter and Paul have adapted a whole variety of varying doctrines.  And there’s always room for flexibility in Christian expressions, such as those who prefer traditional hymns over contemporary songs or vice-versa.  But this variation must be measured against the given Word of God, the concepts and ideas that compose his larger story of creation, fall, and restoration.

This, then, is why Christians entrust themselves to Christian doctrines, because it is through these doctrines that we understand the mind and purpose of our very Creator.  Still, we must admit that we live in an age of “hand-picked truths.”  How might the “givenness” of doctrine confront some of the objections of our present age?  We’ll look at two brief examples.

***A brief warning: one of the illustrations below relates to how different cultures handle their dead.  While it’s nothing inappropriate, I recognize that those who are grieving might be taken aback by the illustration.  I modified it on Sunday for the sake of sensitivity; I include it here for the sake of authenticity.  But if you are in a slightly more raw place, you have my permission to (1) stop here and close the window, (2) be thankful for God’s unchanging Word and (3) to re-join us tomorrow.***

OBJECTION ONE: ALL MORALITY IS CULTURALLY RELATIVE

First, some might object that moral absolutes are restrictive.  After all, if morals are human inventions, why are we not free to reinvent them?  Sure, we might have once seen marriage as existing between one man and one woman, but times have changed, right?  Who are you to impose your oppressive values on someone else?

This objection is really nothing new.  We can find traces of it as early as 2500 years ago.  Here, we have a writer (Herodotus) describing the encounters a Greek King (Darius) has with two different cultures:

“He summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so that they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians of the tribe called Calladae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing.  One can see by this what custom can do.”

Do you see what’s happening?  In one culture, cremation is wrong but cannibalism is right.  In another culture, cannibalism is wrong but cremation is right.  Ah, says the moral relativist, there is no absolute morality, only cultural assumptions.

But maybe it’s not as simple as it seems.  Paul Bloom—a psychologist from Yale University—points out that yes, these differing beliefs “illustrate diversity, [but] they also hint at universals….Herodotus doesn’t talk about people who don’t care what you do with dead bodies…Such people don’t exist.” [2]

In other words, while cultural differences exist, so do strong cultural similarities.  Why are cultures so similar if every culture invents their own morals?  Now, I don’t suggest that this by itself proves that Christianity is true—but these universal morals are certainly consistent with the idea of a universal God transcending the boundaries of all cultures and all peoples and all times and all places.

OBJECTION TWO: I EXPERIENCE GOD IN MY OWN WAY

Second, some might object that doctrine bleeds the life out of our relationship with God.  Instead, we should be looking within ourselves or looking toward our own experiences.  After all, doctrine seems the stuff of ivory-tower eggheads; why would that mean anything to someone like me?

Years ago a man named Ludwig Wittgenstein said something similar about coffee.  He argued that no human language is adequate for describing the robust flavor and aroma of a cup of coffee.  I’ve shared this illustration twice.  The first time, a college-age student raised his steaming cup in the air to voice a hearty “Amen!” The second time (last Sunday), several gentlemen pointed out that in some industries, they’ve invented a series of words to describe the specific taste of things like coffee or barbecue.  But in either event, we might admit that there is something fundamentally different about describing something and experiencing it for ourselves.

Applied to theology, we might see it this way: that no doctrine can possibly compare to knowing God personally.  To be honest, I think we need to admit that this is true.  Knowing God is, of course, a loftier goal than simply knowing things about him.  But men like Wittgenstein—and that college student—forget something: even if we buy that words can’t fully compare to the experience of sipping coffee, words are perfectly adequate for writing directions to the nearest Starbucks.  So, too, does doctrine direct us toward a real and living God.  When we embrace these doctrines, we, too might “taste and see” that he is good, and worthy of our devotion.

WHY DOCTRINE SHOULD FREAK US OUT

The Bible should freak us out.  I don’t mean that we should never find God’s Word comforting, I mean that there should be plenty of times when we open its covers to have our eyes widened and our hair blown back.  I think this is why the writer of the letter of Hebrews tells his readers that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). No other book does this quite as deeply and as consistently as the Bible itself.  No magazine.  No webpage.

I can therefore testify that this, indeed, is the given Word of God, because no other book makes these sorts of demands with such consistency and such fervor.  The Bible challenges our minds even as it softens our hearts; it presses our knees to the earth in repentance even as it lifts our hands in worship.  Doctrine is God’s gift to us—his gift for us.  Follow its truths, and it leads us safely home.

[1] George Johnson, “The Widening World of Hand-picked Truths,” in The New York Times, August 24, 2015.

[2] Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.

I get it.  Doctrine isn’t sexy.  Even the word itself is more likely to provoke yawns than applause, and at the church level it’s more likely to encourage people to roll their eyes than fill the seats.

Yet doctrine helps us understand who we are and what we—that is, the Church—are fundamentally about. When Paul wrote to Timothy, he encouraged the young pastor to “guard your life and doctrine closely” (1 Timothy 4:16), because salvation is at stake.

But what is doctrine?  Today’s world bristles at terms like “doctrine” or “dogma.”  The latter word especially comes with its share of cultural baggage. “Don’t be so dogmatic,” we might say.  The idea of shared beliefs runs counter to our cultural penchant for personal faith and private religious expression.

But this has not always been the case.  Both doctrine and dogma have helped form the Church’s common vocabulary for discussing God.  What do we mean by doctrine and dogma?  Christian doctrine is what we talk about when we talk about God.  Dogma refers to those doctrines that are shared by the Church.

We’ll talk more about the specifics of each, but today I want to begin by giving us an overview of what sociologist Alan Wolfe has called “the strange disappearance of doctrine in the church,”[1] a disappearance he attributes to the modern church’s emphasis on methods and showmanship over theological literacy.  Here’s how to think of this post: I want you to see this as sort of the “You are here” sticker you find on the directory of the local shopping mall.  We’ll look at how doctrine has disappeared from the common vocabulary of our world and our churches—and the tragic impact it’s having on the world today.

AGAINST ALL AUTHORITY

In his book on Scripture, N.T. Wright points out that for most of Christian history, there was little need to differentiate between the Bible and doctrine.  Sure, there were disagreements, even a major split in the year 1054 between the Greek-speaking east and the Latin-speaking west. But even events like this might be seen as sort of the exception that proves the rule.  We might look at two critical pieces of technology that have dramatically changed the world and, along with it, changed the way we understand God and the Bible:

• The printing press (ca. 1500 A.D.). For the first time in human history, information could be rapidly produced and distributed.  This actually helped fuel Martin Luther’s famous “reformation,” where the glorious good news of the Gospel won out against the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.  Of course, the unintended consequence was that now religious authority was no longer centralized in the Church, but had become de-centralized by placing the Bible in the hands of the common man.  Positively, this generated some great dialogues regarding the nature of God and the message of the gospel.  On the other hand, it meant that now, multiple, contradictory interpretations became popularized.  The multiplicity of protestant “denominations” we have today (such as Lutheran, Methodist, even our own) are, more or less, the children and step-children of this diverse time.  Not long after, the European “enlightenment” swept in—an intellectual movement that elevated the individual and the role of reason over the past traditions of community and divine revelation.

• The internet (ca. 2000 A.D.). In our own day we’ve seen another form of technology change the way we communicate.  The World Wide Web has connected us all like never before and created unrivaled avenues for the distribution of information.  Before, distributing your ideas to the public demanded you had to find a publisher to take you seriously before your thoughts became print.  Now anyone with a blog or even a social media page can share their (ahem) “wisdom” with anyone that connects with them.

We’re obviously painting with a broad brush here, but what we’ve seen as we’ve moved from the “modern” world of the printed word to the “postmodern” world of the computer network is a change in what we would call authority—that is, how we trust information.

The move from the modern world of the printed word to the postmodern world of the computer network means we’ve embraced what Max Weber historically called “charismatic authority.”  While traditional authority valued a centralized source (the Bible for example), charismatic authority elevates the voice of individual teachers and leaders.  And, on the internet, you don’t have to look very far to find someone, somewhere, who agrees with the way you think.

In a mid-2000’s article for The Journal of Higher Education, a pair of authors lamented the way that this kind of thinking has eroded the classroom setting.  It used to be that students would be trusting and attentive to their teachers and professors.  But now they have only to access the web to connect to a vast network of “experts,” whose credibility runs only as deep as their Twitter followers.  The result, they say, is that no one takes anything seriously anymore, because the “truth” is always a matter of perspective.

In short, today’s generations no longer believe in absolutes, only perspectives.  In the eyes of such a world, doctrine holds no more meaning than any other personal opinion, and will often be evaluated on whether it can be found useful—or, to put it more negatively, based on whether it affirms or confronts my lifestyle.

INSIDE THE CHURCH

Sad to say, inside the church things have not fared much differently.  For the past several decades, the church has attempted to stand against the decline in religious belief by trying to prove herself “relevant” by minimizing uncomfortable doctrines (such as sin, hell, and the like) and shining a spotlight on the keys to financial and marital success.  Doctrine was assumed to be unnecessary for anyone but the ivory-tower eggheads.  The tragedy, of course, is that this emphasis on practicality and immediacy failed to produce fierce disciples for Christ.  Christian social analyst David Wells remarks:

“[T]he fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to staunch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds.  The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church.  His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common.”[2]

This shift away from doctrine has only eroded the Church’s true identity as the bride of Christ.  In his extensive survey on American churches, Robert Putnam of Harvard University observes that when mainline churches shifted their focus from evangelism to social justice, they lost their core sense of relevancy and rendered themselves obsolete.[3]

THE NEED FOR BELIEF

On the surface, we might imagine that this shift in authority brings us the sort of happiness that comes from being free to find our own answers.  But it hasn’t.  It’s only brought misery and discontent and a profound sense of lostness.  It’s what Johnny Reznik was singing about in 1995 when he wrote the song “Name:”

“We grew up way too fast
and now there’s nothin’ to believe.
And reruns all become our history.
A tired song keeps playin’ on a tired radio,
and I won’t tell no one your name…”[4]

Two albums later the same band closed their album with the lyric: “Can you teach me to believe in something?”

What should our response be?  I submit that it is twofold.  First, we rightly mourn the way we’ve so quickly and so selfishly cast aside the life-giving doctrines handed down by that “great cloud of witnesses” and clung to the temporary, “clever” slogans we find on bumper stickers and internet memes.  Faith is deeper than that, it’s more wonderful than that, it’s more joyous than that.  Second, we press our knees to the earth in humble confession that perhaps we are not the center of the universe after all, and that perhaps God has something to speak into our hearts through his Word, through his Spirit, through his Church.

It is, after all, far too easy to point out the flaws in our world and religious systems.  But for all our folly, the answer is not less religion, but deeper religion, more robust religion, a form of religion that makes much of Christ and less of ourselves.  And so this week as we tread these hallowed halls of Christian belief, may it be our shared prayer that God guide us into all truth, and help us lift up the Savior’s name anew.

[1] Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (New York: Free Press, 2003), 67

[2] David Wells, God in the Wasteland, p. 30

[3] Robert Putman, American Grace.

[4] The Goo Goo Dolls, “Name,” from A Boy Named Goo.