Understanding Religious Heritage Like an Adult
2008 May 20
I remember hearing this long ago, and it’s so true.
Some love their religious heritage the way babies love their mommy. Mommy is so wonderful and is never wrong. And if anyone says anything about my mommy they’re stupid and hateful.
Others despise their religious heritage the way teens sometimes see their parents. My parents are from another planet, and they’re never right.
And even others — like Larry James — see their religious heritage like mature adults. They are thankful for the strengths of the heritage; yet they’re not afraid to wrestle with the shortcomings. They do this in humility, knowing that we’re not passing on perfect understanding or practice to our own children or grandchildren, either.
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It has been said that one of the greatest curses and the greatest blessings was being raised in the good ol’ church of Christ. I am thankful for the foundation and much of the training. However I outright reject legalism in all forms and many of the associated hermeneutics and resulting attitudes and teachings that were a result of our movement. Let’s just stick to the Bible turned into CENI is the only true way to understand the scriptures. “We speak where the bible speaks and are silent where the Bible is silent” really meant we speak where we want the Bible to speak and we are silent where we want the Bible to be silent. I believe much of what led and drove our movement was a sense of sincere duty and well intentioned but there was little perspective and evaluation to keep those noble intentions and sincerity in check. What started as an ecumenical movement to unity and just sticking to the Bible; “We are just Christians but not the only Christians” turned into legalism on steroids and eventually led to the thinking and attitude of “if you don’t believe and think like us then you are not a Christian”. Unity turned into “Think like us and we can be unified”. Gospel meetings were more geared toward convincing people that our ways of doing church were right and theirs were wrong. The gospel meetings were also designed to lead our religious friends to baptism not necessarily Jesus or a real faith in Him. Remember all the public debates over IM and church cooperation and any other issue we would dream up? We turned God into something or someone who was mostly concerned over what happened in a one hour assembly once a week and who could or could not do it and how it must or must not be done. Many churches and brotherhood leaders now don’t believe our religious heritage has much significance, “we are just the church of first century like n Acts”. I was talking with a friend of mine the other day that is also well educated in RM history. We listed a whole bunch of early leaders from Alexander Campbell to TB Larimore to David Lipscomb to KC Moser to James Harding and their respective beliefs evident from their writings. Most of them now would be disfellowshipped by many of the churches of Christ today for one or more of their beliefs. So now it seems for many congregations worship the bible rather than the God who is trying to reveal himself through it. Any group of people who do not welcome a constant questioning and re-understanding of what they believe and why they believe it are no longer seeking the truth but just trying to keep things like they want them to be.
Your Fellow seeker of the Truth,
qb,
What exactly did you mean by “soteriological consequecnes”? Please be specific.
Brent,
The problem with your post is that hell is in the New Testament. Jesus taught on hell and even gave grim descriptions of it (“Their worm dieth not”). Paul also wrote about hell (“taking vengence on them that know not God”), yet you at least seem to imply that Jimmy Allen was wrong to preach on hell so well to the point that one couldn’t sleep. I would say that he did his job.
The problem is one of balance and, once again, I think the accusations against the old church are not fair and precise. The old church was much more balanced in its approach to biblical opposites than the new, enlightened crowd. Just think . . . were you more likely to hear a sermon on heaven in Churches of Christ during the1950s or a sermon on hell at Highland, Richland Hills, Woodmont Hills, etc. in 2008? How about the love of God and the wrath of God? Do you actually believe that Mike would preach on the wrath of God to the extent that B. B. Baxter preached on the love of God?
Granted, I’m not saying that the old church was 100%, completely balanced in how it dealt with issues (wouldn’t that be like perfection anyway?), but the enlightened crowd is not the one to do the criticizing here because they are much more unbalanced in their approach to the harsher nature of God. And even when they do venture to mention hell, punishment, guilt, wrath-all biblical in nature-they apologize 15 minutes before they say what they’re going to say. I recently heard an enlightened guy preach on hell and the time he took apologizing for what he was going to say was longer than the time he spent on preaching hell. Is that the spirit we find in Jesus in the gospels? Is that how the apostles preached in Acts?
Oh, sorry, that pattern theology’s coming out again! Well, for the enlightened crowd: What emergent or missional principle makes it expedient and best not to deal with these issues as Jesus and the early church leaders did?
You said, “. . .a theological system where no one could hope to be saved.” Come on, man, be fair in your assessments. I know we have to generalize to a point because time and space are limited, but, man, it’s hard to even deal with statements like that.
“ . . . no one could hope to be saved.” Unbelievable.
maddog, what I had in mind there was Jesus’ castigation of the Pharisees for “turning over heaven and earth to make one convert, then making him twice the child of Gehenna as [themselves]” (not an exact quote, obviously; qb’s memory does not serve well).
Whether or not God is likely to have mercy on the Pharisees’ contemporary heirs for leading otherwise innocent people into the bondage they set forth as “gospel” is for Jehovah to decide, and I have no thought about an answer. But if Matthew’s rendering of the diatribe in chapter 23 is anywhere close to what Jesus actually said of the scribes and Pharisees, it at least SUGGESTS that bad theology can pose soteriological barriers for its naive adherents.
That’s all I meant.
qb
Kathy, almost thou persuadest me to be a Padres partisan.
K
ind things to say you (and Mike) had.
qnotyodab
Maddog -
You are the official hagiographer of Churches of Christ. To pretend the church was balanced . . . that it wasn’t exclusivistic . . . that it didn’t leave people despairing of any hope of salvation . . . you either weren’t there or you didn’t listen.
I’ve heard lots of ministers who don’t preach on the wrath of God to the extent that BB Baxter preached on the love of God. I bet, however, they preach on the wrath of God and the love of God to the extent he did. Wrath is a vital topic. But wouldn’t you say God’s love is a slightly larger topic — maybe a more dominant theme — in scripture? If not, you make my point.
Jimmy Allen’s sermon on hell was persuasion at its worst. And it betrayed a failure to understand metaphor.
qb,
So, basically a salvation issue, right? This is what I thought you meant. In a typical move, you retreated a bit and left final judgment up to God (for it does belong to him), but you’re basically saying that wrong teaching can affect one’s salvation. I agree. I’ve tried to make that point in several different ways on this board, but no one seems to bite.
The point of contention is not that there are salvation issues, but which teachings, believed wrongly, are worthy of the title.
NOT ONE OF US
One of the first challenges faced by the Christians in Hope, Florida was to seek the Lord’s will as to what should be their posture toward relating with others who believe in Jesus as Savior and Lord but are from different denominations, groups and traditions. These Christians were determined to denounce and destroy the divisive, sectarian spirit within themselves which can so easily take over. They believe deeply that the Lord does not want them to view other believers (at best) as inferior competitors or (at worst) caricature them as full enemies to the cause of Christ. Out of their zeal to be faithful to biblical truth, these believers realized they must take care in deciding when to relate and when to remain separate. This is not a new question for disciples. This has been of concern to the faithful of the Lord in all ages.
The prophet Elijah served the Lord during a time of great discouragement in Israel. Elijah felt that he alone was all who was left of the Lord’s faithful people in Israel. He made this arrogant claim twice to the Lord:
“I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.” (1 Kings 19:10, 14, NIV)
The Lord is in a better position than his children to know who is faithful and who is not. The Lord knows the hearts of each person. The Lord rebuked Elijah’s spiritual arrogance with this surprise announcement:
“Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and all whose mouths have not kissed him.” (1 Kings 19:18, NIV)
How to view others who sincerely believe in Jesus but are, by affiliation, “not of us” (of our tradition, our denomination or our group) has always been of practical concern for the disciples of our Lord Jesus from the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Mainline Protestants denominations have wrestled with this question. The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church also wrestled long and hard with this question. Every faithful Minister or other Shepherd wrestles with this question as well. There is a little narrative from Jesus which may shed some light on the question of how to relate with others. The narrative is recorded in two gospel records, those prepared by both Mark and Luke:
“Teacher,” said John, “we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward.
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said, “for whoever is not against you is for you. And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck.”
(Mark 9:38-42 and Luke 9:49, NIV)
This short Gospel narrative exposes the very heart of the separatist, spiritually isolationist, sectarian posture which began to raise its ugly and divisive head even among Jesus’ very first disciples. Jesus personally rebuked his disciples for their self-righteous judgment of this unknown man they met though he was also serving “in the name of Jesus.”
Folks who believe in Jesus, but who may also be less biblically literate or more spiritually immature, are not to be rejected or marginalized. Jesus taught that to deal harshly with those who love him, even if they are “not one of us” is as sinful and shameful as abusing a little child. To reject them is to reject the One whom they are striving to honor and serve. This need to embrace all sincere believers, as Jesus taught, is part of the deep conviction held by Christians in Hope. This is why they feel that any rigid isolationistic mentality in the body of Christ must be rejected at any and all cost. They feel they dare not give into, perpetuate or display such spiritual ignorance and arrogance even for a moment.