Just because it is one of the more recent pieces I have read along these lines, I'm going to pick on Carl Medearis' post at CNN's BeliefBlog. I don't know much about Medearis, and I don't have any kind of personal beef with him - I'm sure he's a great guy and that he's a sincere Christian doing his best to serve God and His Kingdom. But I think his post is in line with a troubling development in Evangelicalism.
Toward the end of his piece, he says "I believe that doctrine is important, but it's not more important than following Jesus." This sounds good - obviously, simple cognitive assent to a set of doctrines does not cut it ("faith without works is dead"). But in the context of the entire piece, this affirmation that "doctrine is important" leaves me somewhat confused and wondering just what kinds of doctrine he is talking about. His main point seems to be better summed up in the statement that "Encouraging anyone and everyone to become an apprentice of Jesus, without manipulation, is a more open, dynamic and relational way of helping people who want to become more like Jesus — regardless of their religious identity."
Here are two more relevant lines:
What if evangelicals today, instead of focusing on “evangelizing” and “converting” people, were to begin to think of Jesus not as starting a new religion, but as the central figure of a movement that transcends religious distinctions and identities? Jesus the uniter of humanity, not Jesus the divider.Throughout the piece, Medearis is actually downplaying the importance of doctrine in favor of simply following Jesus: "why don’t we simply invite people to follow Jesus — and let Jesus run his kingdom?" The idea is that we will be a lot more successful persuading/helping people follow Jesus than converting them to Christianity doctrinally, and it will be better for everyone.
When I used to think of myself as a missionary, I was obsessed with converting Muslims (or anybody for that matter) to what I thought of as “Christianity.” I had a set of doctrinal litmus tests that the potential convert had to pass before I would consider them “in” or one of “us.”
But Medearis' piece is just my starting point - I don't want to spend a lot of time dealing with this particular piece, so I'll just sum up my thoughts about it thusly (isn't "thusly" a great word?): I think he's wrong.
It seems to me that Medearis' solution to the difficulties and problems with evangelism and doctrine is riding part of the wave of post-modernism. Like it or not, post-modernism is playing out at the popular level now, even within Christian circles. A central tenet of post-modernism is the abolition of truth. Truth has become so murky and slippery, it's getting hard to hold on to even in the sciences. The secular world is wary of truth claims (i.e. doctrines) in the public arena, and now that wariness is even getting into the sacred world of the Church.
It used to be that doctrine is what identified believers as Christians. Yes, there were various disagreements about various bits of doctrine between this and that denomination, etc., etc., but by and large I think we were pretty good at "majoring on the majors and minoring on the minors" - overlooking doctrinal disagreements on relatively minor stuff in order to be united as the Body of Christ. Now that doctrine is out, what is there to perform the function of identifying believers with Christ? Mission. Following Jesus. The Emerging Church as a whole has a strong sense of mission. I read a piece somewhere recently about college kids calling themselves "Christ followers" instead of "Christians" these days. And Medearis endorses following Jesus in his piece. To be sure, being on mission and following Jesus are great and essential things. My concern is that they are on a trajectory to seriously undermine doctrine within the Church, and along with it, truth.
As Medearis correctly alludes, the concept of truth leads to division. Wherever truth claims are made, some people are going to disagree. If the disagreement is vehement, you can wind up with division, even violence. But is that a good reason to jettison truth altogether? Or even just to downplay it? I don't think so. Yet this is the trajectory that the Church is currently on. We're not there yet, and I don't believe we will ever really get there (Jesus is running his Kingdom, after all), but we are headed in that direction.
Jesus Himself said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light." The missional, Christ-follower movement is doing a great job working out the Way of Jesus, but let's not forget the Truth and Light in the process. To love Jesus is to love not only the Way but also the Truth. Yes, Jesus is a uniter of humanity, as Medearis affirms, but Jesus is at the same time a divider - "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Jesus himself made plenty of enemies (it got Him killed), and why should we expect to be different? After all, "a servant is not greater than his master". If Jesus could not set aside the Truth for the sake of making more disciples, more Jesus followers, and less strife, then how can we expect to do so?
Of course, there are more and less winsome ways of holding firm to the Truth, and Evangelicals have not always done a great job in this category. By the same token, we haven't always been good at remembering the Way of Jesus. That's no reason to abandon - or to abolish - Truth. It seems to me that equally upholding the Way and the Truth of Jesus is the best way to let the Light of Jesus shine.
Still, this isn't a simple issue of neglecting the Truth. We are witnessing the abolition of Truth, the playing-out of post-modernism. This is a very large issue and it seems impossible to spread one's arms out wide enough to get a good hold on it. Even so, since I'm critiquing the problem, it's my obligation to offer some sort of solution, right? The reason truth is being abolished is because the grounds for knowing the truth have fallen out from under us. A while ago I wrote a little post about this, so I won't go into all the details here. My solution to the abolition of truth is to re-establish the bedrock foundation upon which we can know the truth. But the old bedrock is broken up and crumbling - so what's the new bedrock? My answer in one word: God.
My one-word answer is admittedly kind of cheeky. But after all, if Jesus is the Truth, what is more natural than to posit that God Himself is the bedrock and foundation of all truth? One consequence of this way of thinking is that it absolutely removes humanity from the center of truth. Determining the truth is no longer about me figuring it out based on "self-evident truths" and logical reasoning. The basis of truth is not my own sense-perceptions, nor even the world itself. The basis of truth is God, and God reveals truth to us - and Jesus, who is the Truth, is the centerpiece of that revelation.
There's a bit of Scripture that always bothered me. The people of Israel want to know how they can tell whether a prophet is a false prophet or not, and Moses' answer is, at first blush, stunningly circular: "When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken." How is this helpful? If one prophet says "Go to Egypt or you will die" and another prophet says "Stay in Judah or you will die", how can I know which one is telling the truth? The answer essentially seems to be, "You decide which prophet you will believe, and then wait and see." Since the prophets are the mouthpieces of God, you could also sum it up this way: "You decide whether you're going to believe God or someone else, and then see how things turn out." Period. There simply is no room for objectivizing God's revelation, for evaluating whether it is true or not - God is simply not subject to evaluation, and His revelation must simply be taken at face value. This is why Paul says "let God be true though every one were a liar." It's why John says "whoever does not believe God has made him a liar". It's why the author of Hebrews says that "whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists". If we don't believe that God exists, if we don't believe His revelation, we are in effect calling Him a liar because He does in fact exist, and His very existence is the foundation of all truth.
In some ways, this analysis is not very satisfying. After all, I'm taking the existence of God as axiomatic, and what if I'm wrong? This is actually exactly the point: to pursue the question "what if I'm wrong" is to subject God's existence to my own evaluation. It's a non-starter. And this, by the way, is where the Truth becomes divisive. If I believe God, everything is good, since God in fact does exist and by believing Him I testify that God is true. If I don't believe God, I'm in trouble, since God in fact does exist and by not believing Him I testify that God is a liar (because He claims to exist when in fact He doesn't). All of a sudden we have goats and sheep, those who are "out" and those who are "in".
But when and how did God ever claim to exist in the first place? When and how has God ever given us any evidence of Himself? This time I have a two-word answer: the Incarnation. John puts it very clearly:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, [...] 3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you [...].Right off the bat, John acknowledges the existence of God as foundational: "that which was from the beginning." He also acknowledges the incarnate revelation of God, a revelation which is commensurate with our own sense-perceptions of hearing, seeing, and touching. This, I think, is the way out of the post-modern mess we're in. The post-modern dilemma is that the objective ground of truth has fallen out from under our feet. The solution is not to abolish truth, but to relocate its foundation away from the world itself, away from our own subjectivity, and to root it in God and His revelation. Jesus is the Truth - this is the starting point. The pinnacle of God's revelation, namely Jesus, was revealed to us by means of sense-perceptions, and this revelation has been passed on down the generations by proclamation ("that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you"), which itself involves hearing (or seeing, in the case of reading).
Of course, there is another Witness to the revelation of God, beyond the repeating proclamations of men: the Holy Spirit. (Ooh, that's a three-word answer.) This is where the rubber really meets the road, I think. If a prophet tells me to stay in Judah or else I will die, how do I decide that he's telling the truth? Ultimately, the Spirit of God must reveal it to me. Notice that we're now back in that lovely circularity again: The prophet is the mouthpiece of God, so it's God telling me to stay in Judah; I'd better believe Him, because by default He is true; I can't evaluate whether the prophet is telling the truth, because that would be to evaluate God; I simply have to decide whether or not to believe; I decide to believe because the Spirit of God has revealed to me that the prophet is telling the truth. Period. I don't evaluate whether the Spirit of God is telling me the truth, or whether it is in fact the Spirit of God who is doing the revealing. We are back where we started: the foundation of truth is God Himself.
That's my take on truth. That's why I think truth should not - in fact, can not be abolished. Truth does not reside on earth or in the human head, it resides in God. "Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists". Whoever wants to follow Jesus must pay equal respect to His Way and His Truth.
To Carl Medearis: Sorry, brother, but I think you're wrong.
