Caution: Christians Using Brains Ahead (Muddy Waters, Box Stuffing Fanatics and Church History)

I was wanting to write a post tonight, but got reading here and there in the more hyper-conservative side of the Christian blogosphere and my stomach began to tighten up and an urge to just shove the whole thing into the toilet began to overcome the better part of my brain.  Though maybe that is the better part of my brain.  Not shoving the blogosphere (or my computer moniter), that is, but shoving a few loud cymbal-clanging teachers that want men and women and their “Christian families” to fit into little tidy boxes or die in the trying.   (No, really.  Meaning literally die trying). 

I had a similar pit tighten in my stomach this morning when I met a lady who knows a lady who I once gave a parenting book to—along with a glowing recommendation.  Somehow we got to talking about the mutual friends we had and whaddya know, up pops the name of this parenting book.  It went from me to the first lady and now she gave it to the lady I met today, soon to be a first-time mom, who was gushing about it. 

The book was the infamous/beloved (depending on your circle), ”On Becoming Babywise,” and is all about scheduling feedings and giving advice to let newborns cry themselves to sleep and reminding parents to watch out for that selfish new baby who will want ridiculous things like, say, cuddling too much, or wanting to nurse in order to be soothed.  

Can you imagine?  What dangerous little vipers babies must be.  I did my best to gently mention that the book was something I liked as a new mom but really had reservations about now, as the good advice was mixed up with some problematic instructions.  I could tell by the way the lady’s eyes changed that not liking the book’s message was not a valid option.  So I smiled nicely and changed the subject.  Okay.  Whatever.  It’s not the first time a book I’ve passed out has come back to bite me in the butt.  There’s at least twenty of the Pearl’s parenting books circulating in my community-at-large, maybe more, thanks to my zealous little new mom hands.  Toilets.  I want to flush them all down toilets.  But I can’t.  They’re on people’s bookshelves and they hand them to other people and the spread if it goes on, the idea that life is a tidy little world and it’ll all go well if you just do a, b, and c. 

No one wants to acknowlege that this thing called life is complex!  If you suggest that reality is actually messy, that sometimes the path is knee-deep covered in mud and the only way to get to the next visible place is to just WADE, that sometimes there are more colors on the page than only jet-black and snow-white, they point long fingers your direction and holler the worst names they can think of at you.  That would be things like, “feminist/humanist/marxist/liberal Democrat/postmodernist/etc, all of which mean a variation of Satan’s Evil Sidekick. 

In circles like some I wander in and once frequented as a member, if you wonder why Jesus somehow neglected to write out a handy dandy list detailing the “Four Hundred and Thirty Two Things You Have to do to be a Christian,” you’re told you must not be one because He certainly did, and if you’re interpreting the Bible’s “clear teaching” correctly you’d already know that, and besides, there’s waaay more than 432 things you should be doing, honey.

 My friend, E, from Water and Spirit—a Jew-met-Jesus type of guy who studies Biblical Greek for fun—and I have been talking about this very thing (the idea that it’s complex, not simple, and that sometimes it feels like the more we study, the less we know).   E, by the way, is someone I first met on a “hip hang-out” type of street corner where he’d set up a table with self-written tracts set on it, along with a few sticks of Nag Champa burning.  He had great discussions with passersby, and I do mean actual REAL discussions as opposed to stuffing his opinions down people’s throats, and one day, one of those people was me.  E helped me take some of my first formative steps into following Christ as a messed-up 19 year old, and my husband and I have been friends with him ever since. 

He me an email lately that really hits the nail on the head.  My stomach is sick with good reason.  It’s not all in my head.  Something’s rotten.  Something needs flushed.  Why aren’t we using our brains?  Why do we think that complexity is evil?  Why are we who come from the evangelical/fundie-hood so afraid of everything that’s not white-wonder-bread flavored.  Who told us that wanting to eat anything but pre-digested little bits of flavorless dogma is to sin against God? 

But E says it better, not surprisingly, so I’ll let his email take it from here: 

So I’m now about halfway through Vol. 4 of Jaroslav Pelikan’s series on THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION. One thing reading this series (5 volumes in all) has done for me is make me realize (I think correctly) how many unacknowledged assimilations of theological assumptions I and pastors I’ve heard and known seem to have operated from.

I read about the development and setting forth of doctrines, etc., from the various figures who came up with them and I think:

“Oh, okay, that’s where the three ways the church’s use of the Law in relation to the Gospel came from” (i.e., 1. for inducing repentance; 2. for maintaining discipline in society; 3. as moral standards for Christians)

or

“Oh, so that’s how/why/when the Protestants first argued against the ‘Real Presence’ by saying that since Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father, He can’t also be present in the bread and wine”

or

“So that’s where the idea was first put forth that the church is the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel,” etc.

I guess if you’re in an old church tradition (e.g., Reformed or Lutheran, or even Catholic or Orthodox) where the pastor/priest makes a point of teaching you the history and cardinal doctrines and distinctives of the denomination, you learn how the founder(s) came up with them, argued for them, and formed a church based on them.

But if you’re in Biblechurchville or Non-Denominationaland, you probably mainly assimilate these things indirectly as the pastor teaches and preaches while operating from theological assumptions/conclusions/teachings that he, too, picked up un-analytically by reading lots of Christian books whose authors also just pass them along as if that’s how Christians have always believed, etc.

(He could have gone to seminary and learned them formally, but since many seminaries are connected with particular denominations, there is probably not a lot of value in getting a broad and deep understanding of church history and the history of the development of doctrine, since there is only one history and line of doctrine that really matters to the people and places he is going to after he graduates. When I took my Greek classes at a Baptist seminary, I overheard ignorant comments about “Charismatics” that students would make in the dining hall, indicating their lack of familiarity with or understanding of things that were not Baptist. With an increased interest in “the early church,” IVP and other Evangelical publishing companies have been putting out books on the subject, yet some I’ve seen/skimmed seem to be ignore things that would cause cognitive dissonance in their Evangelical readers, so the reader gets a highly-filtered and selective understanding of the early church from reading them.)

No, Christians have NOT always believed in the substitutionary atonement and/or believed in it as being THE reason Christ died. It’s not “clearly” what the Bible teaches, even though it does teach that.

No, the communion elements have not always been regarded as being representational with no spiritual effect on the one communicating. That idea didn’t become widespread until just a few hundred years ago. It wasn’t what “the Bible clearly teaches.” It may be what the Bible teaches, but it’s not how most of the early Christians, and most Christians for hundreds of years afterwards, understood the Scriptures about those things.

Your typical newly-evangelized Evangelical Christian is given a systematic theology that is assumed by him and the ones who led him to the Lord, as well as by the pastor of the church he attends, to be what has always been believed everywhere and by all, and is what “the Bible says.”

But it’s not that simple.

And I suspect the messiness and complexity of the history of the development of Christian beliefs is not well known by your average Joe or Jill Christian. And it’s probably because most of the stuff that’s on the shelves of your typical Christian bookstore also repeats and promotes and operates from many of these unquestioned assumptions without knowing or stating how and why and where they came to be.

Or so it seems to me, as I think deep thoughts while being deprived of deep sleep.