From Dust

When I was training to become a minister, I had a class about the Holy Spirit. The thing that stuck out to me most was that a good portion of the class was not about the Holy Spirit as much as it was about a particular minister within the Churches of Christ who was wrong about the Holy Spirit and why he was wrong. This minister, who was most presented as a false teacher and apostate, had written a book about his views on the Holy Spirit and so I bought a copy ready to find all of the error he taught myself.

Twelve years later I still pull this book out occasionally and look through its pages to remind me of the most important thing I learned from it: Taking the time to stop and actively listen to your “enemy,” not for the ammo you need to destroy them but to understand how they came to their conclusion, does more to heal and reconcile than winning a debate. I started writing margin notes in the book to argue against his position, but as you progress you’ll find that the notes become much more spaced out and are more of a grasping at straws than well-reasoned objections. Why? Because I discovered this man had been heavily misinterpreted and misrepresented. Intentionally? Doubtful, but regardless of why, at the end of day I was left making some harsh (and ultimately wrong) judgements against someone because of what I was told about them without ever actually taking the time to listen to that person.

There’s a reason the scriptures say, “let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20).  I was quick to speak against this man, quick to be angry about what I thought he said, and very slow to listen to what he was actually saying. Once I stopped and listened, I realized that he was actually right about a lot of things I thought he was wrong about. Since then I’ve tried to change the way I handle different topics by trying to find someone who actually believes what I disagree with and can explain the position well. When I wanted to learn more about what the Catholic church believes about Mary, I found a book written by a respected Catholic scholar on the topic. I was ultimately unconvinced to change my mind but was able to walk away with a better understanding and even appreciation for what they believed and why.

With people being stuck at home there is much less face-to-face conversation than ever before and most of our discussion is moved online. It’s not the best situation, but we are all trying to work through the whirlwind of topics that have come at us all at once. The problem is that social media tends to dampen productive conversation. It’s easy to see a post or a meme that seeks to prove  something wrong about “the other side,” and quickly hit share without ever really asking a few questions, like: 1) Does this accurately represent what “the other side” believes? 2) Does this show others that I’m willing to hear what they believe and why? 3) Does this portray me as someone who honestly seeks the truth?

Social media also becomes problematic because it allows us to overload others with comments (or be overloaded) ultimately killing the conversation rather than engage in productive dialogue. Couple that with my inability to see your facial expressions and hear your tone which makes listening even more difficult because we seem to often have the tendency to read things in a less than gracious tone with they are directed against something we believe to be true. This leads to a position of defense to protect ourselves and what we believe and we end up losing a position of listening and understanding in order to take up a position of defeating the other person. So, what can we do? Perhaps keep these things in mind.

First, taking time to listen adopts a position of empathy. In his book “The Righteous Mind,” Jonathan Haidt wrote, “If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own.” Many interactions might not revolve around trying to change someone’s mind, but Haidt makes a good point. I need to learn to see things from someone else’s angle, and I can’t really do that unless I’m really listening to them. Perhaps we can consider presidential election years as we’re in one. These tend to revolve around some of our most moral, controversial, and divisive issues, often leading us to a position that the “other side” is evil, hateful, and doesn’t care about others. But what happens if, rather than writing them off as such, we sought to understand what brought them to that belief? It doesn’t mean we have to agree with them, but if I think back to my discussions with people who disagreed with me even on bigger issues like abortion or same-sex marriages, taking time to listen to how they arrived where they are and doing my best to see things from their perspective has always proved helpful in creating a more productive discussion.

Second, taking time to listen adopts a position of humility. That is to say, go into the discussion convinced that you might actually be wrong…or at least still have plenty of room to better develop your own position. The Proverbs say that “a fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion” (18:2) and that “like a gold ring or an ornament of gold is a wise reprover to a listening ear” (25:12). The point? A wise person is always prepared to listen and learn, but a fool shuts his ears and is only present to speak against another. Can we remember a time we’ve entered a discussion ready to prove someone wrong only to walk away having learned a thing or two? It doesn’t mean that the other person is entirely right or that you’re entirely wrong. Rather listening simply means that you recognize your inability to know everything and strive to maintain the humility to believe that even someone that you strongly disagree with might actually be right about at least one thing.

Finally, taking time to listen is adopting a position of love. Imagine you’ve got a belief that isn’t popular or mainstream so it gets the attention of a group that disagree with you, but every time they tell you why your position is wrong they get just enough things wrong  to misrepresent you. Then, every time you try to explain they start talking over you or telling you what you really believe. How would you respond to that? Probably not well. But aren’t we likely all guilty of doing this at some point, telling others what they actually believe rather than listening to what they tell us they believe? How well would the words of Jesus work here when He said, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” The Golden Rule, or the Rule of Love would certainly call us to take time to listen to what others believe rather than approach with a spirit of debate or to tell them what we’re sure they actually believe. Why? Because that’s how we would want others to approach us. We recognize that we can’t treat them with the value and dignity they deserve as God’s image until we are willing to listen to what they believe, just as we would hope they would do for us.

Especially in the midst of the “present distress” listening becomes even more of a needed practice. Yes, it might slow down some discussions, but why would that be a bad thing? Why would we strive to rush through a conversation, especially in a way that demeans others, keeps us from both from growing, and only adds more division and strife to an already stressful time. May we then choose to be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.

As long as I can remember I’ve been a church kid. Even before I could remember I went to church. I even remember finding a small church on Jekyll Island one Summer when we were vacationing there, and I was the only kid in the class, but I also learned how they make mirrors from the teacher. Granted I really just went that day because I wanted a perfect attendance award back home, but still. Despite all this, there are some days that I really struggle to believe in the God of the Bible. I don’t mean the, “I’m questioning if God will provide me with the things I need” type of doubt, but full blown, “There might not actually be a god up there and maybe we are all alone in the world” type doubt. Am I an atheist? Agnostic? No, I don’t consider myself either of those things. I consider myself someone of strong(ish) faith. A believer who trusts that one day God will justly deal with all of the evil that exists in His creation. It’s just that some days I struggle with believing what I believe.

The obvious problem with all of this is that I also get up and preach a sermon once a week and lead a discussion on it that night. I teach teenagers. I visit the hospital as a volunteer chaplain and pray with people for healing, patience, and guidance. My guess is that the most reasonable response to the above confession is that I’m probably the last person anyone would want doing those things, right? You want someone that’s going to bolster confidence and deep faith. Someone that’s going to be able to confidently stand behind anything he says in those settings without wavering. The problem is that I’m just not sure that that’s always possible. In fact, I’m a strong believer in the idea that doubt is a powerful tool in making our faith stronger.

I can only speak for my own experiences, but I believe that many of our churches today are suffering greatly because we treat doubt, especially doubt in the existence of God, as if it were something inherently evil that must be rooted out and destroyed with facts and logic. Yet most people who have struggled with doubt know that that is not usually what happens. You get relief for a while, but not always permanent. Someone may read about the goodness of God, and how He is love, and then look around at the world and see all of the injustice, evil, pain, and suffering, not of the unjust, but of innocent people. How can a God that claims to be love and to care deeply for the innocent allow this to happen? I’ve read plenty of books with all sorts of responses to this question. Cutesy and quaint answers. Deep and twisting philosophical answers. Well ordered and precise logical arguments.  Most of them make sense to me, and I can see how they would be true, but that doesn’t mean they always stick, and in my times of doubt I can always think of a million reasons why these answers don’t really answer anything, or at least only make me ask 100 more questions.

In contrast to this church culture that has all of the answers, and can somehow have faith that seems to easily withstand any storm without even a hint of flickering out, the scripture seems to paint a very different picture. My mind quickly goes to Psalm 13 where David cries out, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,” lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.” Perhaps you read this differently, but I can’t help but see David, the one anointed to be king, continually protected by God, questioning if God is even there listening to him at all. The situation he’s in makes Him question the goodness of God. Granted, the last two verses of the psalm cry out in trust, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about. A believer who struggles with belief. And there are plenty of other psalms and sections of the scripture filled with God’s people wavering between faith and doubt. The more they know God, the more they learn about Him, the more they put their lives in His hands it seems the harder it can be for them to really believe at times.

      What usually happens, in my experience, to those that try to just sweep their doubt under the rug rather than face and embrace it is that their faith becomes more of a facade to cover that doubt that’s building up. They’ll let you know they’re the most trusting believer there is, but it ends up being a sham. Or the person with doubt feels like they’re all alone in the church. Everyone else is so grounded in their faith, and I’m the only one over here struggling. Obviously, I conclude, this is not a place where I belong because I’m not the Christian I thought I was, so they imagine.

      So this is why I believe it’s important for me to stay in the ministry. Not in spite of my struggle with faith, hoping and praying that if I can get up there enough and keep preaching enough sermons that I’ll “fake it till I make it,” because I don’t believe my faith is fake. Like David I believe my faith is deeply rooted in my knowledge of who God is. It’s just a struggle to always hold on to that sometimes. I’ve come to realize that I don’t believe I can get out of ministry, not because I’m some strong champion of the faith, but because I’m the exact opposite. I’m weak, hypocritical, and sometimes talk out of both sides of my mouth…just like many others who try to maintain this facade. But the curtain has just grown to heavy for me, and this idea of faith that so many seem to expect church leaders to have just isn’t something I can hold up anymore. 

      I believe that we need to have more discussion about our struggles. My guess is that some of the people reading this are possible in the same boat I am. Maybe you’re a leader, or at least a very active member in a congregation. Maybe you’re just someone trying to figure out where you are. Maybe you’re someone who has been hiding their doubt under the rug for too long, or someone who feels like an outcast because everyone else seems to have it all together. Wherever you are, I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear your story of faith, doubt, or whatever mixture between the two you’re trying to figure out. Feel free to go to my Facebook and send me a message. Let’s talk about what it means to be believers struggling with belief.

 

Almost everyone seems to love a good mystery in some format or another. My wife and I watched ‘Making a Murderer’ shortly after it came out on Netflix and had to exercise great control to not binge watch it all in a night or two. She has recently flown through a few popular mystery podcasts, and I tend to enjoy a mystery novel every once in a while. People love a show that has twists and turns, that leaves you constantly trying to figure out how all of the pieces work together, how you could have missed who this person truly was, how in the world the story can continue on from here. The more confused we are about something that truly intrigues us, the more we seem to want to investigate it and learn more.

A few weeks ago in my Wednesday night pre-teen class we were studying God’s faithfulness to the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) despite their lack of faithfulness in many occasions and one of my students asked, “What sort of God is this?!” That question is a good one that has sunk deep into my heart over the past few weeks. I’ve never asked that question in my life as much as I have since she asked it in class. Stop and think about the God of the Bible and think for just a moment about all that God has done in the scripture and ask yourself, “What sort of God am I dealing with here?”

This question came to a sort of climax recently as I started studying the Gospel of Luke again. I had somehow missed how many times it notes how the things surrounding Jesus left people confused and trying to figure things out. Go back and read the first two chapters of Luke and make note of how much confusion you find, and how often you read about Mary, Joseph, and even the shepherds treasuring these events and new information they’ve gained…only to reach the end of chapter two when Jesus tells His parents in the temple, “You still haven’t realized what I’m all about? Where else would I be?” It strongly predicts a story at the end of Luke where Jesus meets two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus, yet they don’t recognize Him at first.

This brings us back to the question posed in the title. Is confusion about God better than knowledge about Him? Well no, but you can’t experience the fullness of Christian life without both. After calming the storms and the sea the disciples are left asking “Who is this man?” (Matthew 8:27) and I worry that we don’t ask this type of question enough. We life in a church culture of systematic theologies, lectureships, and sermons that give all sorts of proof and information about what the Father, Son, and Spirit are like, and we become satisfied with the knowledge that we have and we go on to simply pass it on. These are the facts. This is what you should do. This is what you get out of it.

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the trend within the scripture, at least not fully. So often are people left confused the more they learn about God. Jonah couldn’t seem to figure out God (Jonah 4), Mary and Joseph struggled to understand it all, and even after the resurrection some worshiped Jesus while in doubt (Matthew 28:17)! Yet this doubt, this confusion, this sense of awe and trying to piece it all together seems to be what kept them coming back for more.

Knowledge is good, but when, but when it’s the only way we really interact with God, being seekers of information, then we eventually either get frustrated and quit because we can’t know, or convince ourselves that we’ve got it figured out and move on to the next task without ever truly exploring the topic again because once we know, why would we?

So no, confusion about God is not better than knowledge, but neither is knowledge about God better than confusion about Him, at least to an extent. Without the good kind of confusion that leaves us in awe and wonder at the majesty of God, our search for what He’s all about will not have the best motivation. We’ll be searching in the end for simply knowledge to store away and maybe act a bit differently in our lives. But when you read the scripture and allow the awe to set in, I promise you that your life will begin to deeply change.

So go back and read Luke 1-2 today, putting yourself in the place of the characters you read about. Imagine yourself as Mary learning what she learns from the angel. Picture yourself as one of the shepherds and what it must have been like to have an angel appear and be surrounded by God, only to have the heavens peeled back to reveals a multitude more. Imagine being Mary, having just given birth, hearing a knock on the door late at night only to find a group of dirty, smelly shepherds who have rushed over to worship your newborn son. Imagine being Joseph in the temple as an aged priest rushes over, grabs your son from your arms, and begins to prophecy of all of the great things He will do. Think of yourself as Mary who is told by this same priest that your son will pierce your heart, but that it must be done to fix all things in the world. And imagine yourself as a parent who has lost a twelve year old son, only to find Him hanging out with great theologians and going toe to toe with them in religious discussion. And after you’ve done that, sit back and think about how strange it all is, how confused it leaves you, but also how it makes you thirst to know Jesus that much more.

In 2016, Ben Giselbach released his first book in what appears to be a series titled ‘You Are a Theologian.‘ In the first book he notes that his purpose of this series is a response to the decline of faithfulness over the past few years within the Churches of Christ. There is often a cry for teaching fundamentals, but as Giselbach rightly points out this is usually a call for to teach on more controversial issues. While these issues aren’t wrong to study, I agree with Giselbach who writes “it is impossible to adequately teach these issues in a productive way without first teaching the truly fundamental matters underlying these issues” (v). What are the underlying issues? The understanding of what the Bible is, how it came to be, and how to properly read and interpret the text. In this book, Giselbach writes to help solve just that issue.

I don’t want to make this review long and complicated because the book isn’t either, and you don’t want to read a long boring book review, so let’s talk about what I liked about the book. First, the book itself has good design and really great quality. I’ve been very impressed by the quality of the books put out by many of younger preachers who are mostly doing it on their own (it’s reminiscent of the work done by Michael Whitworth of Start2Finish books). Second, I really like that Giselbach emphasizes the idea of all everyone being a theologian. While it can be a “smart and churchy” word, it simply means  “how we view God” (1), and since everyone has a view of God, or talks about Him in some way, it is important to understand how to rightly talk about Him. Third, the book is just easy to read while tackling what can be pretty big issues. From how we got the Bible as it is today, to what it means when we say that the text is inspired, and how we can rightly interpret the text to understand what God desires His people to do. While these topics can be difficult, Giselbach presents them in a way that is easy to understand whether you’ve known these things for decades, or if you’ve never even picked up the Bible.

So while there was a lot I liked about the book, there were also some things I didn’t like. I knew that Ben and I stand on some different pages theologically going into this, so I don’t want to be picky and spend a lot of time on some of our differences in how we may interpret passages, or pick apart doctrinal conclusions that I disagree with. Instead I want to make note of some things that I believe take away from the book having a bigger impact. This section might seem a bit longer, but that will mostly be because it includes more quotes from the book. The main concerns I had with the book seemed to fall under the category of contradictions from Ben, mischaracterization of those who disagree with him, or what seems to be a misinterpretation of quotes he uses from those he disagrees with. Again, I won’t spend a lot of time on these as I don’t want to bash the book, but they might be something to be aware of.

There are a few times Ben seems to contradict himself, such as on page 81 when he talks about praying before studying. While addressing “Holy Spirit illumination” which he discusses earlier, he notes that this prayer isn’t the same as that where “it is falsely believed that the Holy Spirit will miraculously reveal knowledge to you that you were supposedly unable to read for yourself,” only to turn and write “in reality, by asking god to guide your study, you are asking for His divine providence to help you as you seek to apply His word to your life.” From my experience, most who claim that the Spirit helps with their understanding don’t mean it the way Giselbach presents it. Certainly there are those who believe that, but I don’t believe that it is the majority that do. At the same time, to suggest that we pray for God to act providentially is to call God to intervene in someway to provide us with knowledge that we don’t yet have. I don’t see his position as really being different from what most people believe as he presents it here. While there are other instances of this, this might be the most obvious one.

There are also times where Giselbach mischaracterizes those who disagree with his conclusions. Lines such as “If you believe one interpretation is as good as another” (80), or saying “but more often then (sic) not, critics of this method of interpretation are simply seeking license for what God has not authorized” (104). I believe this type of language takes away from the effectiveness of the book. First, most people don’t believe one interpretation is as good as another. If someone said that Jesus wept in John 11:35 because He was thinking about a commercial for abused animals on TV, no one would say, “Well if that’s your interpretation, then that’s fine!” Unfortunately many have taken the idea that while the text has one meaning we might not always interpret it right and there are multiple ideas that do make sense into some foreign idea that we can just make the Bible say what we want and everyone is cool with that. I’ve yet to read anyone, even the most liberal theologians, who would actually suggest that. Along with that comes the idea that people just wrongly interpret things so they can keep sinning with a clean conscience. This is a judgement of motives that Giselbach doesn’t have the ability to make unless someone explicitly states that’s why they’re doing it.

Finally, there are a few instances where Ben appears to misinterpret authors he uses to show flaws in their positions. On page 5 he writes about those who would read the scripture and build doctrines from it in the same way  as a brain surgeon who doesn’t care about the actual proven way of doing it, but just does whatever he feels once he’s in your skull, or a contractor who builds a house on a whim, rather than by a plan. This is coming from an earlier quotation of liberal theologians Brian McLaren and Leonard Sweet. While I’m sure I disagree with these authors on many things, the quotes Giselbach used don’t appear to be suggesting what he claims they do, that they just believe what they believe about God and the scripture based on a whim. Rather they seem to be criticizing, in the given quotes at least, the notion that just because a highly educated theologian (or a group of them even) once wrote a book that said “this is the truth and the only truth” doesn’t make it so. I think that is a fair statement to make. Another instance pops up on page 102 with a quote from Hal Hougey, which Ben says promotes an idea that loving God “somehow excludes obligation” to obedience. Hougey notes how “our service to God is our response in love to him who first loved us, not the obeying of commands simply because they are there to obey.” Well, isn’t that what God wants us to do? The scripture as a whole talks about obeying God because He has loved us and pulled us out of darkness. We see this in Exodus 19 before God even gives any of the Ten Commandments to Israel. Ben notes John 14:15 as proof that Hougey is wrong, but I only see that as strengthening Hougey’s argument. We obey God because we love Him, but why do we love God? Because He first loved us. While I don’t want to judge motives, it sometimes seemed as if Giselbach was willing to ignore what these verses actually say (though their larger context may prove his assessment right), though I don’t want to speculate on how or why this happened.

So we’ve gotten through the good and the bad, so the most important question is if I would recommend this book? The answer is yes, that I would. Ben’s writing style and use of quotes when it comes to addressing those he disagrees with is a bit troubling (and I know I struggle with the same issue quite often), but fortunately it doesn’t show up too often. While some may disagree on some of the finer points of the hermeneutics chapter, it does do very well at presenting some much needed topics in a way that is easy to understand and present to others. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series to see where he takes it.

In his book on prayer, Richard Foster includes a chapter on praying the ordinary. He wants his readers to be better equipped to see how God is at work in even the most mundane aspects of life, and learn to pray the prayer of action. Jean-Nicolas Grou wrote, “Every action performed in the sight of God because it is the will of God, and in the manner that God wills, is a prayer and indeed a better prayer than could be made in words at such time.”

Foster continues by listing a number of things that this might include that can be easy to overlook like sharing our car with others, leaving early to get to work on time, and even staying up late to listen to a friend in need, but then he says this. “Then, too, we are Praying the Ordinary when we see God in the ordinary experiences of life. Can we find meaning in the crayon marks on the wall made by kids? Are they somehow the finger of God writing on the wall of our hearts?” At first this seemed a bit strange, a bit out there to me, but then I remembered something that I’d like to share.

It took me a bit of time to find a picture, but I finally did. A picture that included the wall scribble in my old office. You can barely see it, but it’s just a thin blue line up under my dry-erase board. The writing on the wall, the scribbles of a child. Not even my child actually. We had some friends visit a few years back. We only knew each other over Facebook, and they were in the area so we invited them to stop by and spend some time with us. While visiting their young son ended up scribbling on my office walls. They were embarrassed and I didn’t care.

Then I moved to a different office when it opened up, but the mark stayed there. My kids liked to play in that room with other kids at church, so I still saw it often and remembered their visit. Almost a month ago some ladies at the church decided to turn the room into a counseling room for me. We would finally put that room to use and that was a good thing. They rearranged furniture, decorated the room nicely…and gave it a fresh coat of paint. The mark was gone, and then this last Monday I read back over Foster’s chapter on praying the ordinary including the quote from it that’s above. I remembered the mark, and I remembered that it’s gone now.

While I would sometimes use the mark to tease our friends a bit, reflecting on it now reminds me of how much God spoke through the ordinary things. The things we “just get used to being there.” The everyday things that are so common we barely even think of them. The mark wasn’t really just a mark on the wall. It was a reminder that the world we live in today has allowed us to easily connect with people from all over the world. It was a constant reminder of another young couple about the same age as my wife and me, working to serve God, His people, raise children, survive, learn, grow. It was a reminder that though we might not ever see our friends face to face again in this life (maybe we can change that sometime in the future) that the time we did spend with them was a blessing and how I look forward to their eternal fellowship.

The scribble of a child was God writing on the wall of my heart.

What mundane and ordinary things surround you? What is in your life that you overlook day after day simply because you’ve gotten used to it being there? What is God saying to you through all of these things?