Monday, July 9, 2012

Playing at Doctrine


  
          The study of doctrine has always been a pleasant preoccupation for me—one of my favorite things. There is no explaining it, really. Why do some people like getting their hands dirty gardening? Why do others spend hours scouring Kijiji.ca for bargains or Ancestry.com researching family roots? I don’t know. But I love reading about, thinking about, and sometimes even writing doctrine. It’s a hoot. Except for one thing.

          You see, other people, and even whole institutions (churches, usually) are also preoccupied with doctrine. Except that for them it doesn’t seem to be a fun thing so much as a weighty thing. Some take doctrine so seriously, in fact, that if you don’t agree with them they will argue with you. They might even send you nasty letters and emails, or publish articles denouncing your views, or even threaten to have you tossed out of the church. All of which seriously deflates the doctrinal imagination and takes the fun out of doing theology.

            Early in my ministry, for example, I was asked to give a talk about God’s creation to a lady’s society from a neighboring church. I broached the topic of cosmic and biological evolution. I had just spent a year of full-time graduate study, at seminary, exploring these topics and so I was eager to share what I had learned. However, a few days after my talk I received a letter from this society, signed by all of its members, warning me that if I didn’t repent of my evolutionary theology I was headed for hell. I had been having fun trying to fit the Biblical and Scientific pictures together; the women were so aghast with my musings that they made sure I was never invited to speak or preach in their church again.

            And that is the problem with doctrine. People take it far too seriously. One imagines that getting doctrines right about creation and or evolution, about infant or adult baptism, or about pre- or post- or a-millennialism—one imagines that if getting these doctrines right was important to God, he would have been a lot clearer about them in scripture than he actually was. Which brings up another doctrine, of course. Is scripture’s teaching about so much that we take so seriously divinely inspired, or is it a result of the limited knowledge of merely human writers—or both?

            The truth is, for the first millennium and a half of Christianity, when most followers of Jesus could neither read nor write, it was sufficient for Christians to know the basics of the story, memorize the Apostles' Creed and Lord’s Prayer, and do as your priest told you—especially when it came to the obligations of neighborly love. And theology? Doctrine? Well, that was the preserve of a tiny minority of scholars who carried on a lively debate about many things that never entered into the consciousness of most Christians.

            These days, a lot of scholars bemoan the fact that people are not reading anymore, and that the doctrines and teachings of the church are therefore beyond most folks’ understanding. As a result, Christians now tend to go to their churches not out of a deep intellectual commitment to its doctrines, but for community or out of habit or for some other reason. I’ve bemoaned this fact myself, in articles published in scholarly journals. I guess, in a perfect world, we’d all wish that everyone had a lot more knowledge and wisdom.

            But there is another, brighter, side to this coin. You see, when people are no longer preoccupied with theology or with making sure that everyone else toes their church’s doctrinal line in the sand, people are freed to focus on the main thing. The main thing isn’t assent to pages and pages of truths Christians in other traditions disagree with. No, the main thing is loving our neighbors. In fact, for most of us loving our neighbors is hard enough all by itself.

            Nevertheless, I have to admit that for the sheer joy of it, doctrine is still my playground. And for the times I mess up I expect God will just pick me up again, dust me off, and say something like, “That’s okay Johnny. Go and play some more.”

12 comments:

  1. John,
    I just discovered your blog through Scot McKnight's postings on your book. I recognized your name from when we played fantasy baseball online together! I appreciate your thoughtful comments and am looking forward to reading your book. I wish you and your family the best.--Brad

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    1. Hey Brad, small world when we come into contact in two such unrelated ways. I never even knew that religion/spirituality interested you! Hope all is well. What are you up to? JS

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    2. Do you have an email at which I could reach you? Hope your transition is going well.--Brad

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    3. John, I don't know if you are aware of it, but there is a rather intense discussion on CRC Voices of this blog article and your book, "Not Sure." As you might expect, some comments are not positive -- among them mine. If you would like to correspond with me on these matters -- either here or offline, I'd welcome the opportunity.

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    4. Hi Dan. Thanks for the note. I'm not surprised by your discussion, though till now I was only vaguely aware of it. I'm also really engaged with my new church work and new community, and don't want to risk too great an emotional engagement with something else--like this discussion. I have changed my mind; I'm still trying it on and figuring out where it will go. I've made a point of trying to leave the CRC as quietly and peaceably as possible. If people really want to go on the war path, there have always been and still are many religious figures much more liberal than me. Go after them! And hopefully, even where disagreement is difficult, grace--the kind that humans share--abounds.

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  2. In a conversation about different seminaries, someone asked, in reference to a theologically liberal seminary, "do they teach doctrine as truth or as information?" That was the first time in my life that I had considered that question. It was the beginning of a journey in which I have had to ask myself lots of questions like that one. I do like "playing at doctrine" too, but I am often asking myself whether it is truth or information.

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  3. Does it have to be one or the other? If God had wanted to be clear about a lot of what we find in scripture, I'm assuming he could have written a systematic theology. But he gave us stories, sometimes in triplicate (even though they don't share the same perspective on everything), a few letters, lots of laws we don't pay any attention to. It is way too reductionistic to call this "truth," especially since we immediately think of truth in an Enlightenment manner, as a body of syllogisms. I'd rather think of doctrine as our (hopefully whimsical) attempt to bring way more clarity to scripture than scripture itself provides.

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  4. Why is it that so many have tried to squish the Bible and its message into post-Enlightenment molds? You mention the concept of truth. I think the best (or actually worst) example of this is the "Biblical Inerrancy" movement. The Bible never postulated itself as inerrant. Why do people try to force that on it now?

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  5. Stephen... I did a double take when I read your comment that the Bible never postulated itself as inerrant. Check out 2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:20,21 and 1 Thessalonians 2:13 for starters. The Bible does claim to be the Word of God...the real issue is whether an individual accepts it as truth or rejects it.

    Wayne

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    1. Hmm. This is an interesting approach. The fact is, accepting the Bible as (in part or whole) a word from God doesn't entail inerrancy. Inerrancy is a concept whose invention was only made possible with a rationalistic Enlightenment worldview. The texts you mention have been interpreted many different ways depending on one's presuppositions--and everybody has presuppositions, regardless of their theological position.

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    2. I understand that accepting the Bible as a word from God doesn't mean that it is inerrant just because it claims to be. I was responding to Stephen's claim that scripture doesn't make that claim...I absolutely think it does by the verses mentioned. Those particular verses are crystal clear in meaning and talking about "presuppositions" with all due respect sounds like a cheesy way out to cast doubt on what can plainly be understood.
      Wayne

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    3. I guess we just need to disagree here. I don't think those texts entail anything like inerrancy as defined by modern Fundamentalists. Take the Timothy passage. "God-breathed," doesn't entail inerrancy. In fact, even by the text's own admission, it entails only "usefulness." Am not going into the Greek here, but there is nothing in this text that suggests inerrancy as generally understood.

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What do you think?