Doctrines are, for the most part, our attempts to explain a reality we are too shallow and limited to explain. Jesus didn't heal the sick and rescue the lost sheep by way of a doctrine. Rather, doctrines arose so that we could better understand the freeing, the healing, and the rescuing. Doctrine teaches. It enables us to identify the real from the fake, to understand which way to turn on the many matters of our life that Jesus did not speak on, and to prevent us from simply meandering away from our Shepherd. It frees us to spend our time living the faith instead of pondering the meaning of every little trifle. It gives us confidence to know we can go in a certain direction and not lose our love for God. Most of all, it is a way for each generation of Christians to pass along the most important parts of what they and their forebears learned about the faith over the course of 2000 years of living in it.
But doctrine itself gives no life at all. What gives life is that which the doctrine is about. For instance, what saves you is not a solid doctrine regarding how you were saved, but the actual work of Christ on the cross, from which any solid doctrine of salvation arises. If you get the doctrine right but don't put your life behind it, what good is the doctrine? The Reformers termed that frigida opinio , cold opinion, with which a person may agree with to the last detail but not have it touch them inside. It doesn't put them into action, fire up their passion, or change their attitude toward life. It is very much a dead letter.
Truth is not just something said or communicated or taught. Truth can also be in the doing, flowing out from a specific event in time and space. Truth can be discovered in what happens, and can be supported by other things that happen. Truth can be found not just in thought, but in deeds; not just in doctrine but in action, like the Spirit is in action. This is what happened at Pentecost -- the Spirit made an event of it, things happened, supported by fire and language miracles, and people took action. Through that 'happening' and those actions the truth of Christ was spread. We worship, we serve, we evangelize: we do the truth. When the Spirit is in us, so is Christ; Christ is truth, and so then collectively we embody something of that truth. This is one of the ways the Spirit relates life in Christ to our own lives.
If all that is true, then what of theology? Theology cannot be drawn purely from experience. It's one step removed from that, even at its closest. In theology, people try to understand God's doings among humans and in creation as a whole. Thus it's not direct, but 'processed' through our minds.
We go about theology with lots of resources -- only one definitive resource (Scripture), but with an array of non-definitive or less-definitive resources such as tradition, relationships (including the fellowship of other Christians around us), the opening-up work of spiritual discipline, participation in worship and in the sacrament of Communion, the life of prayer, etc etc. And you, too, are a resource. Hasn't God been at work in you? Haven't you seen God at work in the lives around you? Don't you bear God's image? Your faith experiences and your thoughts are rightly and justly a part of the picture of theology! Yet, you are a limited, broken, corrupted, and often-deceived resource, one among many in a vast world of other resources. Thus, your experiences are only a part of a bigger picture, important but not the whole story, a part whose meaning cannot be found, except :
These are the tools of spiritual discernment, the Spirit's way of cross-checking us against the results of the distortions of sin.
By the way, if I substituted the word 'reason' for
'experience' in what I just wrote above, the same would apply.
The mistake of many theologians, scholars and thinkers over the
years has been that they trivialize the rest of the resources,
or worse, make them bow the knee to the great god Reason. The
mistake of many believers today (especially new believers,
people who have had very powerful experiences, and some
pentecostalists) is that the other resources are made slave to
'experiences'.
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|
"As a foolish church
presupposes his presence and action in its own existence,
in its offices and sacraments, ordinations,
consecrations, and absolutions, so a foolish theology
presupposes the Holy Spirit.... Only where the Spirit is
sighed, cried, and prayed for does he become present and
newly active." |
GOD-TALK CAN LOSE ITS CONNECTIONScholastics and others who stress theology and doctrine do something important for Christians. They teach us that belief has a content to it, without which it is wrong belief and perhaps even evil belief. However, in mainstream circles at least, the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought an extreme tipping of the balance, treating theological formulation and inquiry as being more important than the development of such things as trust, faith, love of neighbor, and amendment of life. Eventually, thinkers think their way into explaining how the bad is really good, and creating all sorts of excuses for what is, on the face of it, sin. Not that there was no precedent for it : Luther railed
against the dogmatism of the Catholic Church of his day,
and Lutherans themselves only a few generations later
lapsed into a scholasticism which nearly severed the ties
between that which is to be believed and the person's
life of faith in Christ. The change could even happen
within a lifetime, as with Calvin and the early
Calvinists, and the way they ran the city of Geneva.
Pietists such as the Wesleys, Otterbein, Spener, Hauge,
and the founders of the Evangelical Covenant in the US
and the Inner Missions in Europe, set about to restore
the vitality of the relationship between the believer and
God, a relationship that is itself a work of the Holy
Spirit. (That some pietist churches eventually made
themselves slaves to their behavioral codes is a matter
of history, but it didn't have to happen that way.) |
Critics of the charismatic movement have often charged the charismatic renewal with a "unitarianism of the Spirit". In a way, it's unfair; they are as attentive to Jesus as mainstream church people are. But some of them are rather 'binarian'. I've been to Pentecostalist services where God the Father is mentioned only a few times, usually in the Lord's Prayer and in the blessing when leaving. The bold, mighty First Person of the Trinity is often reduced to a petty persnickety judge, or even worse, a warm fuzzy teddy bear.
Charismatics would counter that the church has, for many centuries, written the Holy Spirit out of the Trinity. That too is not entirely fair. The Eastern Orthodox have a rather lively sense of the Holy Spirit as God. The Lutherans have leaned rather heavily on the Spirit's arrival in Baptism to explain their theology of justification and sanctification. The Methodists and Anabaptists, each in their own way, highlighted the Spirit's work in reshaping one's way of living. But even in those churches, and more certainly in others, the overall scope of the Spirit's work was generally ignored, and the very specific work of the Spirit in giving gifts was even denied. While the Spirit can work through process, the Spirit does not automatically work in processes nor do those in the process automatically hear the Spirit. Since they did not seek the Spirit with any sort of earnestness, the Spirit was in practice written out of the decision-making process of most church structures. Until the arrival of Karl Barth among theologians, and the influence of the Azusa Street movements in the grass roots, the Holy Spirit was reduced to something we zipped past in the creeds, something which the more educated folks were hoping Christians would outgrow.
Luther was well aware that his emphasis on grace could lead
us away from living a new life, and onto the path of having no
standard of sin and little sense of hazard or consequence for
what we do (the belief called 'antinomianism'). He saw the work of the Holy
Spirit as being the link that gives us Christ, and thus
Christ's tough holiness:
"Antinomians fail to see that
they are preaching Christ without and against the Holy Spirit
because they propose to let the people continue in their old
ways and still pronounce them saved. And yet logic, too,
implies that a Christian should either have the Holy Spirit
and lead a new life, or know that he has no Christ."
(from *On the Councils and the
Church*, Luthers Works [Pelikan/Lehmann ed.], vol. 41,
p.115.)
what the long word 'pneumatology' means.
In the Gospel of John (7:14-18), those at the temple where Jesus
was preaching wondered about how Jesus could know so much
without being schooled by the rabbis. Jesus replied that his
teachings were not his, but God's, and then said that those who
do what God wants will know where the teaching comes from.
Jesus thus linked the knowing to the doing -- not as much to
the content of knowledge as to the purpose of it.
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Many leading Pentecostalist preachers speak endlessly of glory, of the 'chosen' and the 'elect', of claiming victory. It is, to them, more than a mere accent within the faith; it is the whole secret to living in the faith. It doesn't take very long for one to notice something wrong here: it seems clinical, automatic, easy, whitewashed. Nothing is said about how to get there; it's something to be just simply claimed and enjoyed. Even their struggles get stripped down and neatly filed into the past. To me, that sounds like a promotional keg of beer, or a one-night stand; one doesn't ask where the cost lies as long as it's not extracted right now. Yet it's proving to be as popular as the beer.
A more truly Christian view of glory flows out from the risen Christ and from the Spirit's arrival at Pentecost, but to take part in that glory, you have to take it up Jesus' own road -- by first taking it through the death and the resurrection of Christ (Matt 10:38-39). This turning to the Cross (just like turning to our baptism) is a constant thing, showing itself in new ways with each new moment. If this turning is not happening, the glory is not of God. These particular preachers don't take the cross anything near seriously enough. Christians have something to celebrate, but they also are called on to take up their crosses and follow. Many theologians of the cross have too often short-ended the glory part of it, relentlessly critiquing any talk of victory even where victory has been won. God's resurrected life and God's glory are every bit as real as God's death. If and only if we share in that death, then we share in the new life, and because of that we share in the glory.
A stress on the theology of the cross can become twisted up by dwelling on the down side of everything: a lot of thinking and talking about weakness, poverty, suffering, helplessness, alienation, or inner conflict. The Catholic orders of the Middle Ages stressed 'servitude' so much that many of their monks and nuns developed a sense of self so weak that they were left unable to love or serve with all the effectiveness and possibilities at their disposal. It's not just our anger that the sun shouldn't set on. It's also our wallowing in fear or self-pity, our navel-gazing, or our nit-picking at ourselves. (The phrase 'let go and let God' comes to mind.) Then, there's the tendency to make our struggles seem gargantuan, in order to give ourselves excuses for failure or to produce oohs and aahhhs from other people. But Christ is much bigger than our puny "great big" struggles, and his work on the cross is much mightier and much tougher than any obstacle we might face. His victory is the biggest win ever.
The theology of the cross is shown in the crucified
self, and the theology of the empty tomb is shown in the
believer's newness of life.
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There's a lot of talk lately about 're-imagining God'. There are all sorts of theological, ideological, and political reasons that many Christian thinkers want us to do this, not all of which come from bad or evil motivation. The 're-imaginers' are taking note of the fact that the people of this era we live in are disconnected from the Church, and think of God differently than in the past. They reject some of the main images the church has used over the years to describe God: judge, lawgiver, commander, master, the One to whom vengeance belongs, the wholly other, male, etc etc., in favor of friend, colleague, lover, life force, female, etc. Tradition and Scripture have, of course, used the latter group of images as well as the former, in controlled and careful ways. But 're-imaginers' reject the controls and the carefulness as being put onto them by an enemy or at best by authority figures bent on staying privileged. When they reject even reasonable limits on method, they do so at their own peril. From everything I've seen or read of them, the results do not bear out their claim : the fruits are rarely there. The balance is almost totally absent, the means of discernment are all placed beneath one or another ideology, and the Scriptures are used even more selectively than by their opponents. Even with that, their basic questions are not only fair, but necessary. All questions are fair when we're talking about God, so long as we turn to the right places as we pursue the question.
The main problem with the 're-imagining' approach is that it comes from the wrong angle. It is not God, or even our image of God, that needs to be re-imagined. God is not the problem. We are. On our own, as we are, we are totally unfit to even begin the task of re-imagining God. That means we can't re-imagine ourselves by first re-imagining God. We're not able to do it. We are the ones who need to be re-imagined, not God.
We are to re-imagine our 'victimizations', real and imagined, in the light of the Gospel, and in the hope and the possibilities, and in the God-given perseverance and change-creating powers that Scripture tells us about. We are to re-imagine what 'success' is, in the light of this Jesus who, when He died, seemed to be as total a failed waste of time and talent as there ever was, but who still shapes peoples' daily lives and thinking long after Caesar, Herod, and the Sanhedrin were relegated to the shop talk of historians. We are to re-imagine how we think of 'power', based not on how much control or influence we can have, but on Jesus' example of how truly we serve others. We are to re-imagine our 'necessary means' through the meanings in the means of grace, through what is ultimately necessary to get that which ultimately counts. We are to re-imagine our 'orientation', not on physical attraction but on re-orienting our entire selves toward God. (This is true of both 'straights' and 'gays', so don't try to wriggle out from it.) We are to re-imagine our 'wealth', not on the basis of TV stars and advertising and corporate moguls, but on the basis of the Beatitudes found in Matthew and Luke. We are to re-imagine our ability to make decisions, not as a lordly right by which we can command others to either help us do our sins or be silent, but as a responsibility that first asks about how others are affected before asking about one's own needs (legitimate or otherwise). We are to re-imagine 'happiness' from a selfish smiley-faced bliss-out to the joy of accomplishing God's great purposes for us, one and all.
We are to re-imagine our entire lives, goals, experiences
and identities by way of the Spirit's work in the Word, rather
than re-imagine God by way of our own experiences. OUR
imagery about OURSELVES is what needs to be re-imagined
first and foremost; it's a lifelong task. Only then can
you really understand what it meant for God's Son to come among
us. Those who get that backwards are only fooling themselves
and are missing the point.
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A definition of pantheism
the Documentary
Hypothesis.
Some Links :
Thinking about God? Try these pages :
"Cheap grace is grace without
discipleship, grace without the cross."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, *Cost Of
Discipleship*, p.47
"Your worthiness gives you no
help, and your unworthiness does not harm you. As one drop of
water is as compared to the great ocean, so are my sins as
compared with God's incomprehensible grace in
Christ."
Johann Arndt, *True Christianity*.
"It is impossible for a person
not to be puffed up by his good works unless he has first been
deflated and destroyed by suffering and evil [to the point
that] he knows that he is worthless and that his works are not
his but God's."
Martin Luther (Thesis 21, *Heidelberg
Disputation*)
"The truth is not simply what
you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is
said, and to whom, why, and how it is said."
Václav Havel, *Disturbing the Peace*
"Theological variability is
endless, but not limitless, not relativistic: there are
dogmatic parameters within which it works itself out."
George Lindbeck, "Reflections on Trinitarian
Language", *Pro Ecclesia* IV #3, Summer 1995
"Theology is an effort
to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not-
worth-knowing."
H.L. Mencken
"Shallow understanding from
people of good will is more frustrating than absolute
misunderstanding from people of ill will."
Martin Luther King Jr, *Why We Can't
Wait*
"The point of having an open mind, like having an
open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
"Though we must recognize the humanity that is in
the Church, we must always allow for the interventions of the
Spirit, whose workings brought the Church into life. The
'freedom to challenge' must always be tempered by the need to
preserve the signposts which may have far more guidance and
truth than our challenges."
Emil Beck
"Jesus said unto them : 'Who do you say that I
am?'.
And they replied : 'You are the eschatological manifestation of
the ground of our being, the kerygma in which we find the
ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationship.'
And Jesus said : 'What???'"
-- passed along by Yvon Malenfant
"Not only do the rich among us pursue our
philosophy, but the poor enjoy free instruction. For the things
which come from God surpass the reward of worldly gifts. Thus
we accept all who desire to hear -- even old women and youths.
In short, persons of every age are treated by us with
respect."
Tatian
"One cannot speak of God simply by
speaking of man in a loud voice."
Karl Barth *The Word of God and the Word of Man*,
p.195-196
"Understanding God is not attained by calling
into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to
debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind. God
cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the
origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or
just another concept."
Abraham Joshua Heschel, in *God In Search Of
Man*
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