Stand in Wander, part 1: The Bible

Note: I promise not to make a habit of wonder/wander puns.

I started this blog as an attempt to free myself to write and build, but apparently the space is not the problem. The problem is me. I have been convicted of late that I have practiced silence for too long. Wisdom suggested it as one conflict after another seemed to indicate peacemaking was in order. There is a fine line between peacemaking and “peace-faking,” as Ken Sande calls it. The past decade has been an increasingly precarious time for relationships, so why make things worse?

Why indeed. Well, as a teacher, you really cannot afford to be silent all the time. You have to pick some fights, even if you’re not a pugilist. I have some fight-picking in my past, and I walked away from that on purpose. But as so often happens in human nature, the same correction that keeps you from driving into oncoming traffic can wind you up in a ditch. We are always correcting. I think, to extend the metaphor, that just as we eventually log enough hours behind the wheel that we don’t notice our own self-correcting actions on the road, one sign of maturity is logging enough hours in self-correction that it becomes second nature, imperceptible.

And some corrections are, no doubt. But occasionally you still need a good conscious jerk of the wheel to avoid a problem.

So in this post, I want to outline some of the convictions that I hinted at in the beginning and take time to flesh them out in the weeks and months ahead. This is not to say I am done wandering. Far from it. I love to learn, and I will always need to be correcting something. And I don’t see myself becoming any more “normal” anytime soon. So the identity holds.

But there is no necessary conflict between the idea of wandering and standing. (Especially when one term is even less literal than the other.) It is not a lack of conviction that drives me to wander, but the convictions themselves that drive me on. For me, to wander is to stand.

But stand in what? What follows are not formal arguments so much as a set of positions related to one another. They represent varying degrees of study and reflection, but of course none are immune from correction where needed. Still, they are worth articulating from time to time if for no other reason than my own growth. Note, too, that this is not an exhaustive list of convictions like a doctrinal statement. This is a subset of views that have taken me in unexpected directions and invited a conflict or two along the way.

Method/Revelation/Bible

I still believe that the Bible is both a divine and human book, authored by men moved by the Holy Spirit such that the words of the text are the very words of God. Contra critical scholarship, I do believe in inerrancy. Historical backgrounds can be helpful for discerning the meaning of the text, but second-guessing the text is of little value. Contra folk spirituality, I do not believe it is a magic book where God gives you a special word through the text. The text is the word. It was written to someone else, but for your benefit.

Because of the Bible’s divine source, it bears God’s authority. To disobey the Bible is to disobey God. To accept the biblical account of something is to accept God’s own account. The Bible is not God, but it is a trustworthy expression of God’s wisdom and will. Contra modern approaches, the text of the Bible cannot be corrected by anyone or anything. This includes the sciences, my reason, and my conscience. Contra some strains of fundamentalism, I recognize my interpretation of the text does need correcting at times and that what seems obvious is not always true.

The scope of the Bible’s content is sufficient for discipleship, and it is clear enough in its essentials that God can hold the reader accountable for understanding and obeying it. No one can plead “you never told me” if it was in the Bible. That being said, spiritual things are spiritually discerned, so some truths will not make sense without the help of the Holy Spirit.

This brings me to one of my most crucial distinctive convictions: if we want more of the Holy Spirit’s help, we find it not by turning inward but turning to the community of faith. It is perhaps common knowledge that we should read the Bible in order to let it form our minds. It is perhaps common knowledge that sin quenches the work of the Spirit, so we strive to walk in obedience in order to receive His help. But many believers learn (because they are so taught) that if we want more than this, we must learn to turn inward and find the voice of the Spirit in our hearts. We must wait as Elijah did for a still, small voice. We must ask for God to guide us as He did the apostles in Acts, who could say “it seemed good to the Spirit” to do thus, and be “led by the Spirit” here or there. We long for that intimate connection with God, and truly Scripture teaches that God Himself indwells those who put their faith in Him.

This can cause Baptist thought to lean in a charismatic direction. We expect God to work immediately, personally, and miraculously, and that when He does it is a sign of our maturity, that we are doing something right. And God can work in those ways, make no mistake. But God also works through things, corporately, and in ordinary ways. He occupies both spaces. And we must recognize that God does miracles not only for the fit but the unfit, the beggars, the outcasts, the weak. I don’t ever mean to find myself telling someone what God cannot do, and so I am not opposed to the way Charismatic Christians characterize the magnitude and frequency of God’s power. My concern is that too often we mistake the source of our certainty, our reason, our conviction, our conscience, our impulses, our motives, etc. We might think that the strength or clarity of those inner thoughts and feelings mean that they come from beyond us. But why?

God can work this way. But I submit that even if you fully embrace the idea that God can speak to you, whether through impulses and feelings or verbal messages within or without, you need the community of the Spirit to verify and clarify. How much more so for those of us who do not expect such frequent, personal, immediate (that is, unmediated) communication and direction from God?

We dare not turn inward until we have learned from the community of the Spirit. First, because being a Christian means being a part of the church. When we receive the Holy Spirit, we join a pre-existing community of the Spirit. We are united to Christ together. We find our identity not in a label we appropriate but in the real organism united by the Spirit, in the new family created by that second birth and by adoption. Second, because the Spirit has been ministering to this community since the beginning. He is not just your teacher but our teacher, not just your comforter but our comforter, not just your keeper but our keeper. And so if we desire to experience the ministry of the Spirit, why on earth would we ignore the work He has already been doing?! On the contrary, that which is most necessary for faith, He has already supplied to the entire church. Which brings me to my third point: if we are to discern the wisdom of God, we need to consult the record of what He has already provided. Only then can we know how to interpret our inner life.

This is my Baptist apologetic for church history. Too many of us were raised to think church history is merely the record of how humans got in God’s way and spoiled God’s work. This presents far too high a view of man and far too low a view of God. Christ said He would build His church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it. The community of the Spirit was not extinguished when the apostles died, nor when Constantine meddled in the church, nor in the evolution of Roman Catholicism. Pick your favorite corruption narrative. This is not to say we have not been weak or confused or divided at times. Not at all. We do not accept tradition uncritically; I would have to turn in my Baptist card if that were the case. But I need other Spirit-filled Christians to help me discern where I end and where the Holy Spirit begins. And I need Spirit-filled Christians who are not like me to help me look for blind spots. Some of these blind spots are no doubt cultural, but many are the result of the times we live in. We need Spirit-filled Christians from other times to help us discern our modern and postmodern blind spots.

So you can see I’m passionate on that point.

Apparently this will have to be a series because I haven’t made it very far through the traditional theological categories. Let me at least try to round out the list of distinctive convictions regarding Scripture, revelation, and method.

The Bible is not the sole source of truth. God’s works reveal who He is, especially the divine image in women and men. God’s wisdom and order precedes and arranges our reasoning. God’s goodness and holiness precedes and arranges our conscience. There is no space in all of creation where God does not exist, and it is all upheld and sustained by Him. Therefore, everything that exists is both relevant to our pursuit of God and not rightly understood until it is related to God. The supreme expression of God is in Jesus Christ. With Christ as the interpretive center of the Bible, the Bible the interpretive center of tradition, tradition the interpretive center of reason and intuition, all of these together form an interpretive framework for everything that exists.

Interpretation is far too complex to get into in any detail here, but in short, I would call interpretation a judgment of the meaning of things, a dynamic response to what is in the thing based on what is in us. Good interpretation arises from informing our judgments with the right values in the right proportions. This partly happens as part of life, a kind of literacy of basic functioning in the world. It partly happens as we are taught to read, gaining textual literacy in our language. But it is completed by discipleship, learning to value what God values, to judge by what He has revealed, and to make connections accordingly. We receive the text, and it acts on us, but we receive it best when we are prepared, and the spiritually mature believer reacts with increasing fidelity.

I have dropped a few hints about reason along the way. I shall leave that as-is for now.

In his systematic theology, Pannenberg provides something of a history of prolegomena, the growing need to say something before we get into the traditional doctrines of the church, the substance of which might follow that of the Apostle’s Creed. It grew corresponding to the need to gain a hearing, to remove obstacles that would prevent one from accepting what follows. I have felt that need acutely throughout my life. But you will see from my discussion above that I cannot conceive of prolegomena as a word before doctrine. It is a set of convictions that arises with doctrine and from doctrine. You will not get very far before you have to confront the nature of God, the nature of man, and the interactions between them. You have to know that we as a race were limited before we became sinful, and now we are both. Our hope for truth comes from the work God has done to reveal Himself, heal us, and teach us. So our convictions must arise from a complete picture of doctrine: the work of the Son and the Spirit, the effects of the Fall and the work of salvation, the process of salvation in the context of the church, and the telos found amid last things.

I have by no means exhausted either prolegomena or the relevant convictions from other doctrines. Even so, perhaps I have said too much for one post. I can always flesh out and nuance and separate later. Today it is enough to stand.