. . . softening hard truth for evangelism in public undermines truth for the waffling believer in private.
I think in general this is what cultural adapters fail to realize: making the truth more palatable for unbelievers to help them make a step toward orthodoxy serves even more (it seems historically) to help loosely orthodox people feel how unpalatable orthodoxy is and move away from it.
Don’t give the impression that some sermons are biblical, exegetical, theological, doctrinal, while others are practical, pastoral, relevant and helpful. Strive to demonstrate that both sides are really on the same side - there really is no contest.
A few weeks ago I asked someone to please explain why Joyce Meyer was selected to be one of the distinguished plenary speakers at the 2007 World Conference of the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC) to be held in Nashville, Tennessee this summer. A friend's recent inquiry about my estimation of Mrs. Meyer's teaching prompted me to elaborate on the reason for my befuddlement.Is Joyce Meyer Ministries a "word of faith" ministry?Joyce Meyer Ministries believes in the Word of God. Joyce teaches that God has made promises to us in His Word and as believers, we should trust His promises (see 2 Peter 1:3,4). However, it can be damaging when people place their faith in faith alone instead of placing their faith in God. Misappropriation of God’s promises solely for personal gain is not scripturally supported.
Notice that in neither case does Meyer answer the question directly, allowing her to safeguard against alienating herself from either the Word of Faith audience with which she at one time more openly identified or mainstream evangelicals who would steer clear of anything that smacked of "name it and claim it" teaching. All she does is affirm belief in God's Word and promises, an affirmation with which every Christian (and many cultists) would agree. The critical issue is not whether Meyer believes that God has made promises in which we should place our confidence. It's whether what she believes the Word of God says is consonant with Word of Faith teaching in which case it is discordant with biblical teaching.Does Joyce Meyer Ministries teach a "prosperity gospel"?Joyce Meyer Ministries believes that God desires to bless His people. Joyce teaches that God’s blessings and prosperity apply to the spiritual, emotional, physical and financial areas of life. These blessings and prosperity are then to be used to bless others (see Genesis 12:1-3). A “prosperity gospel” that solely equates blessing with financial gain is out of balance and could damage a person’s walk with God.
I love all people, and I am loved by all people. (cf. Luke 21:17)
All my children have lots of Christian friends, and God has set aside a Christian wife or husband for each of them.
I take good care of my body. I eat right, I look good, I feel good, and I weigh what God wants me to weigh.
I operate in all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which are tongues and interpretation of tongues, the working of miracles, discerning of spirits, the word of faith, the word of knowledge, the word of wisdom, healings, and prophecy. (Aside from the fact that the apostle Paul teaches that no believer possesses every spiritual gift (1 Cor. 12: 4ff), the omission of what Paul identifies as a higher gift is interesting in light of the following confession.)
I am a teacher of the Word.
I know God's voice, and I always obey what He tells me.
My car is paid for.
I am rich - very rich.
I receive speaking engagements in person, by phone, and/or by mail every day.
We have all the new furniture we need. We have a new car.More on the power of positive confessions can be found in Meyer's commentary on "healing Scriptures" and her brief article "God's Prescription for a Sound Mind" in which she advises: "As you recognize a lie to your mind, always defend yourself out loud. That means speaking to Satan and the evil forces out loud, binding them in the Name of Jesus, and forbidding them to lie to you and to use your mind" (emphasis hers).
Contemporary Christians want to go high-profile in every conceivable way except in saying what they believe. In doctrinal matters, the best most can do is a kind of generic "Jesus is Lord-ism," and the worst is to declare war on confessional Christians as divisive bigots harming the Body of Christ and driving away seekers.Spencer identifies three contributing factors to doctrinal invisibility, among them - commercial interests. His comments on this point are relevant to the subject of this post:
Take, for example, the Christian publishing empires. A successful author such as Joyce Meyer now crosses any and all confessional lines and is marketed as a generic evangelical. Her books are as palatable to Pentecostals and Baptists as they are to Charismatic Catholics. The fact that Mrs. Meyer is a member in good standing of the Word-Faith movement of Kenneth Copeland and Kenneth Hagin is not going to be emphasized. The day when a Word-Faith teacher would be unwelcome in a Baptist church are gone. Mrs. Meyer, who has many commendable applications of scripture, gives no evidence in her popular books of a specific commitment to anything other than the most generic kind of Christianity. One will read all her books without finding that Mrs. Meyer holds loyally to the bizarre views of Hagin and Copeland.
Such doctrinal invisibility is on purpose. The editors and publishers of the thousands of books Meyer sells will make sure that no hint of her own specific Word-Faith doctrines appear on to those pages. While there are some publishers that exist to present specific doctrinal points of view, the largest and most influential Christian commercial interests are the most skillful practitioners of doctrinal invisibility.
Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilized peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place. “When they knew God,” wrote Paul, “they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”
Then followed the worship of idols fashioned after the likeness of men and birds and beasts and creeping things. But this series of degrading acts began in the mind. Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.
Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and the history of the Church confirms it. So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards declines along with it. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God. - A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (San Francisco: HaperCollins, 1961), 3-4.
The Bible spends much more time on shaping the spiritual mind than commanding particular behavior. We need far more training in the ways of grace, of spiritual perceptions, and of what God is really like, than we do in how to communicate with our spouse. Understanding the glory of Christ is far more practical than our listeners imagine. Properly preached, every sermon based on a passage of Scripture is fundamentally practical. Every author of Scripture wrote to effect change in God's people. It is our job as preachers to find the persuasive logic of that author and put that clearly and persuasively before our people through biblical exposition.Thank you, Lee!
Now if you ask a representative sample of Christians whether faith and life ought to be in harmony, they will answer a resounding "yes." The rub comes when you put the question in a specific way, in relation to a particular aspect of work or area of responsibility. For example, if you are a homemaker and I ask you whether your religious convictions should influence the way you bring up your family and relate to your neighbors, you will probably nod your head in agreement.I think Banks's observation is accurate. It is far easier for us to deal with general principles than it is to invest the time and mental energy required to ponder which biblical truths are pertinent to specific situations and how. I just finished a chapter called "The Credibility Gap" in which Banks offers ten theses, half of which explore the gap many Christians recognize between their faith and their routines. The other five deal with the gap between how theology is customarily written/taught and everyday life. It is this half that I found most interesting, especially what he has to say related to the following thesis: "Our everyday concerns receive little attention in the church."
But then if I ask you whether those convictions have as clear and direct an influence on the kind of house you have, area you live in, and the means of commuting you use, you will probably pause to think. Unfortunately, we are unaware how much our decisions in these areas are molded by broader social attitudes and have little distinctively Christian about them.
Most Bible studies are of little help here. They tend to concentrate on the exposition of biblical books or on the discussion of theological themes. Obviously these are basic concerns, but why is so little attention paid to the proverbial passages in the Bible or to the lives of some of the ordinary figures who feature in it? Doctrinal topics or broader social and political questions, perfectly valid in themselves, tend to squeeze out more everyday concerns in study groups. Even work-based Bible studies and study groups rarely address the specific questions, dilemmas, pressures, and aspirations that arise in the employment situation. In fact, the concentration upon pure Bible study in some of these groups is often an escape from grappling with the real issues of life.That last sentence really caught my attention. We can use even the Word of Truth to shield ourselves from facing reality. We can treat theology like a sanctified narcotic by which we seek to flee life's pain and discomfort - not only our own but that of others. Remaining at the level of abstraction can keep me at a safe distance from the particulars of another's misery.
Doctrine is dramatic precisely because it is about real life, namely, the way of truth and life identified with Jesus Christ. It's all about equipping the people of God to walk the way of Jesus Christ in the real world, a world that is complex and confusing. If theology is to serve the church, what it produces - doctrines - should help us understand not only the past but also our present.
Theology is 'faith seeking understanding' (Anselm), but understanding is not merely theoretical. We demonstrate our understanding only when we show that we know how to live as disciples of Jesus Christ, people who know how to embody the truth of the gospel in diverse settings and situations. Doctrine is dramatic when it aids and abets lived understanding.
Christianity is essentially about dramatic action, about what God has done in the history of Israel and especially in the person and work of Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. Drama means 'doing,' and the Bible is all about the 'doings' of the triune God: Father, Son, and Spirit. Speaking is a form of doing, too; the action in some plays is largely dialogical. In Scripture, God gets the most important speaking and acting parts.
Doctrine directs disciples to act, yes, but to act not as hypocrites but according to their true natures and in accordance with the way things really are in Christ. Doctrine tells us not how to pretend to be something that we are not, but rather who we really are; the vanguard of a new creation. Doctrine defines me as a creature of God made in his image and as an adopted child into God's family. My true identity is ultimately a matter of my union with Christ. All other identity-markings-political affiliation, class, race, even gender-while important, are ultimately only secondary.
[T]he imagination enables us to see the parts of the Bible as forming a meaningful whole. But we can go further still. The imagination also enables us to see our lives a part of that same meaningful whole. This is absolutely crucial. Christians don't need more information about the Bible, trivial or otherwise. What the church needs today is the ability to indwell or inhabit the text, the ability to make the Bible serve as the framework through which we interpret God, the world, and ourselves.
I think a picture of doctrine as theoretical information has held evangelicals captive for too long. We believe the right things and sign on the dotted line of our confessional statements, but too many of us are unable to relate our official theology to everyday life. There is a tremendous disconnect. We know how to profess, but not to practice, the cross.
Most evangelical textbooks view doctrine in terms of teaching or of factual propositions. Liberal theologians tend to see doctrine as an expression of religious experience. So called 'postliberals' have recently suggested that doctrines are like grammatical rules that describe Christian talk and Christian action. My own view is that doctrine is a matter of dramatic direction, direction for understanding and participating in the gospel action. In other words, doctrine gives us guidance for our new life 'in Christ.' What you have to remember is that understanding is not merely theoretical: Christians have not only to know but to do the truth.
The cover of the current EFCA Today gives a clue. The issue is devoted to the relationship between doctrine and life.
There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we can comprehend and grapple with; in them we feel a kind of self-content, and go on our way with the thought, "Behold I am wise." But when we come to this master science, finding that our plumb-line cannot sound its depth, amid that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought "I am but of yesterday and know nothing."Theology, properly pursued, should not only inform our intellects but shape our characters. In other words, it should nurture Christian virtues. Every encounter with material that requires me to mentally reach beyond the level to which I'm accustomed and with which I'm comfortable, is an opportunity to practice patience, perseverance, and self-denial. Taking the time to read and reread something that I initially find confusing and/or irrelevant to my immediate concerns can teach me something of what it means to listen attentively to another in love, not insisting that everything revolve around my concerns. And, as Spurgeon reminds us, far from breeding arrogance, our growth in the knowledge of God should strike us with the awareness of how little we really know.
One of the best things about the Christian worldview is that it opens the door to wonder. The reason is that Christianity contains something greater than bare cause-and-effect. Ours is a worldview without a roof, so it not only has room for mystery and glory but it constantly points us towards these wonderful things. It is said that the longer Darwin lived, the less taste he had for music, poetry, and literature. His worldview made his life smaller and smaller. But the Christian can and should see wonder in all things. From something as simple as a leaf, to the baby's cry, to the crashing cosmos, Christians should constantly exclaim in wonder, "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!"If our theology does not evoke praise, we have not gone far enough.
The basic insight is that the Bible is not simply a deposit of revelation but one of God's "mighty acts" -- a mighty communicative act, to be exact. Scripture has a role -- a speaking, acting part -- in the drama of redemption precisely as divine discourse. Scripture not only conveys the content of the gospel but is itself caught up in the economy of the gospel, as the means by which God draws others into his communicative action. Jesus is God's definitive Word, to be sure, but Scripture projects his voice and extends his action (48, here and in following quotations, emphasis is in the original).Scripture, according to this understanding of redemptive history is far more than source material for building theological systems. It is a script intended to direct the life of the church. If theology is to be consonant with the dramatic nature of its subject matter, it cannot be satisfied with merely repeating doctrinal formulations from the past or with mental apprehension of biblical truth:
The script exists for the sake of speeding the drama of redemption. The ultimate purpose of the divine canonical discourse is to form a new people, the vanguard of a new creation. This is the "perlocutionary" [According to speech-act theory, the perlocution is the effect produced by saying something. This is in distinction from the illocution, the act performed in saying something] purpose of Scripture, its intended effect. Dramas are not devised primarily to convey information but to move us, to persuade us, to delight us, to purge us of unwanted feelings (182).It's not that intellectual understanding is of no value. As Vanhoozer points out, actors must understand a script in order to render a faithful performance. Understanding, then, is displayed not solely by the ability to repeat the lines, but to live our parts. This requires more than rote recitation of lines and mechanical acting which amount to hypocrisy. Vanhoozer believes that the famed acting teacher and director Constantin Stanislavski has something to teach us. According to Stanislavski's system for learning how to act (referred to as "the Method"), an actor must become his or her role. This encompasses the use of the intellect, yes, but other cognitive factors as well. "What doctrine [understood as theo-dramatic direction] communicates --its 'import'--involves the whole person: cognition, affection, and volition alike" (100).
Canonical-linguistic theology is not simply a hermeneutic, a way of dealing with the text, but a way of life: a scripted and spirited performance, a way of wisdom generated and sustained by word and Spirit. As such, it is as concerned with training performers as it is with understanding the script. Its intent is not merely to inform but to transform minds. Canonical-linguistic theology represents a kind of cognitive therapy that aims to replace distorted patterns of thinking with patterns that correspond to canonical practices, to theo-dramatic reality, and, ultimately, to the mind of ChristIn the introduction, Vanhoozer writes, "The hoped-for outcome of canonical-linguistic theology is nothing less than the missing link between right belief (orthodoxy) and wise practice (orthopraxis): right judgment (orthokrisis)" (30).
The "mind of Christ" refers not merely to Jesus' intellectual quotient or his stock of knowledge but to his habitus: the distinctive pattern of all his intentional acts--desires, hopes beliefs, volitions, emotions, as well as thoughts. The mind of Christ refers, in a word, to the characteristic pattern of Jesus' judgments--to the way that Jesus processes information and to the product of that process: the embodied wisdom of God. The mind of Christ is the set of moral, intellectual, and spiritual habits or virtues that serve as the mainspring for all the particular things that Jesus does and says (255-256).
This book sets forth new metaphors for theology (dramaturgy), Scripture (the script), theological understanding (performance), the church (the company), and the pastor (director). It argues that doctrine, far from being unrelated to life, serves the church by directing its members in the project of wise living, to the glory of God. It sets out to convince ministers and laypeople alike not to dismiss doctrine as irrelevant, and to encourage theologians not to neglect the needs of the church. It aims to make the pastoral lamb lie down with the theological lion. Its goal is to refute, once and for all, the all-too-common dichotomy between doctrine and real life. Christian doctrine directs us in the way of truth and life and is therefore no less than a prescription for reality (xii).The rift between so-called "academic" and "practical" theology has long been a burr under my saddle so to say that I'm enthusiastic about this kind of thinking is a gross understatement. In the paragraph preceding the one I just quoted, Vanhoozer states that doctrine is vital to the church's well-being and witness. "The problem," he writes, "is not with doctrine per se but with a picture of doctrine, or perhaps several pictures, that have held us captive." What he has in mind is the picture of the Bible as a deposit of revealed truths or assertions about states of affairs. According to this view, theology's primary goal is to abstract and arrange these propositions in a logically consistent system. But this is flawed for a number of reasons. First, this approach is reductionistic in that it recognizes only one of the many things that authors and speakers do with words. Referring or informing is only one of language's many uses. God does more in and through the Bible than impart information. He promises, commands, warns, comforts, etc. Scripture is revelatory, but is more than revelation. Privileging assertions over other linguistic practices entices us to focus on the intellect at the expense of our other faculties and on theorizing at the expense of practice.
The main defect of propositionalism is that it reduces the variety of speech actions in the canon to one type: the assertion. This results in a monologic conception of theology, and of truth. To think of theology as a monologue, even a truthful monologue, is to reduce theo-drama -- in which the dialogical action is carried by a number of voices -- to mere theory. Neither the theo-drama nor the canonical script can be reduced to propositions and theories without significant loss. Doing justice to the biblical text ultimately requires a different kind of exegetical scientia, one that goes beyond propositionalism without, however, leaving propositions behind (266).Vanhoozer, then, is not denying the propositional content of Scripture. He's simply calling us to recognize that there is more than meets the eye (and the heart) than assertions. He proposes a postpropositionalist hermeneutic where the prefix post- means "beyond," not "against." Faithful interpretation, according to Vanhoozer's proposal model, is not merely a matter of sound exegesis and conceptualizing. Conceiving of the Bible as script means that our understanding of it is ultimately demonstrated by our following its direction in contemporary situations:
"Faith seeking understanding" involves both coming to appreciate the meaning of the script and knowing how to perform it in new contexts. Hence theology is both an exegetical scientia [disciplined knowledge] that is faithful to the canonical text and a practical sapientia [practical wisdom] that is fitting to the present cultural context. The ultimate goal of theology is to foster creative understanding -- the ability to improvise what to say and do as disciples of Jesus Christ in ways that are at once faithful yet fitting to their subject matter and setting. The church continues to perform the same text in different contexts, despite the difference of centuries, cultures, and conceptual schemes, by "improvising" with a canonical script (32).Reading The Drama of Doctrine reminds me of another passage I marked in another sizable tome -- Calvin's Institutes:
Doctrine is not an affair of the tongue, but of the life; is not apprehended by the intellect and memory merely, like other branches of learning; but is received only when it possesses the whole soul, and finds its seat and habitation in the inmost recesses of the heart....To doctrine in which our religion is contained, we have given the first place, since by it our salvation commences; but it must be transfused into the breast, and pass into the conduct, and so transform us into itself, as not to prove unfruitful (III. VI. 4.).Don't let the cost or mass of this book stand in the way of your reading it. It's worth the price and physical exercise is good for you.
