Truth-Based Unity at the Cost of Truth-Based Division

Romans 16:17-20

I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. Such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive. For your obedience is known to all, so that I rejoice over you, but I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Why does Paul seek unity (“watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles”) and, in the same sentence, advise disunity (“avoid them”)? His Inspired letter to the Romans shows his wisdom: for unity grounded in truth, it may be necessary to cause truth-based division from those whose doctrine runs contrary to the doctrine of the apostles.

The Greek for what is translated here ‘flattery’ is literally translated ‘good word’, and the word is translated ‘blessing’ in almost every other occurrence in the NT. This essentially means nice, good, well-spoken people will “deceive the hearts of the naive.” I certainly think the Church is in grand need of a face-lift, but can we abandon doctrine if it was so important to the early Church?

A New Kind of Christian

I finally started reading it. I got a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com for using my credit card so much, and I ordered it and started reading it: A New Kind of Christian by Brian Mclaren. For those of you who don’t know (as I didn’t until recently), that is Mclaren’s ‘it’ book.

 

I’ve read two and a half pages and already I have to comment. On pages xiv and xv of the introduction, Mclaren discusses two theories of paradigm change, both similar. I will recount the second one he mentions. In the preceding passage, he discussed his feeling in 1994 that he was sick of being a pastor, and, perhaps to a deeper extent, being a Christian. He describes the shift he went through with this diagram:

 

“Area 1 refers to the old paradigm, the old mental map or way of seeing things. Over time, it becomes increasingly cramped and feels more like a prison than freedom. Area 2 describes the early transition period, where there is a high degree of frustration and reaction. An individual or group in this phase turns against the old paradigm and can’t stop talking about how wrong, inhumane, or insupportable it is. In area 3, people gradually turn from deconstructing the past to constructing the future and begin the hard work of designing a new paradigm to take the place of the old one. This is a time of creative exhilaration, challenge, and perhaps anxiety-because the discovery of a new paradigm that will be superior to the old is by no means assured and because the wrath of the defenders of the old is likely to be unleashed on those who dare propose an alternative. If the creation of a new paradigm succeeds, the group moves into area 4, where the new era develops and expands freedom and possibilities. (Of course, one must anticipate a time when the new liberating paradigm itself becomes confining and old.)” [Mclaren xiv-xv]

 

Recently, I have had (about two or three months ago) what I refer to as a ‘spiritual enema’, in which I took every ounce of dogmatic belief I had been indoctrinated with and threw every bit of it away. I became highly disconcerted due to unanswerable, challenging questions about the existence of suffering, reliability and inerrancy of the Bible, and everyday disgust with the way Christians conducted themselves.

 

I started to get really frustrated with Christians in the two bodies that I am a part of: Christians at ODU and Christians at Crossroads. I noticed that the bulk of our time is by far spent on becoming ‘better’ Christians, dealing with the tough things in life, learning more about Jesus and the Bible, and worshipping through music. I complained a lot and was a whiny, overly critical jerk. (I still am, by the way.) I started questioning everything. Why, I asked, are there megachurches that have eight gazillion worship services? How many times can you sing songs about how much you love God and still get the same ‘buzz’? How much of what you’re doing is a pure emotional rush? Why am I not feeling the same emotion you are? Is your relationship with God better? Are you a better Christian than I am? Am I a Christian at all? (I still think that our American church needs to take a good, hard look at the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, but that is neither here nor there. Or is it? What if Christians not only read but actually lived the Bible?)

 

I lived in self-denial for a few months after I came back from Peru, convinced that the problem was my own fault and that I needed to shut up and accept things. That obviously did not prevail, and I had to come to grips with my walk with God was full of lies. Lies that I had been telling myself that things were ok, and lies to God, insincere prayers that were amazing lip service to Him but oddly similar to the prayer Jesus warns against in Matthew 6:7-“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.”

 

Once I realized how fake I was being with God and myself, I had a crisis of belief and may or may not have become depressed. I abandoned all of my commitments and stayed in my apartment for the better part of a week, completely distraught because of how much I had learned was wrong.

 

I was forced to cling to my basic philosophical belief in God: that He is. Naturally following that are His omnipotence, His omnipresence (kind of), and His omniscience…but not His omnibenevolence, because that doesn’t have to be necessarily true…but I digress. From there, I took steps towards redefining and establishing my belief as to who Jesus was and what He was and what He did. I realized (painfully) that many of the things I have been taught were wrong. Many things were kind of off, but there were also flat out lies: things contradictory to Scripture, the early church, and common freaking sense.

 

I started reading like there was no tomorrow, reading, reading, reading; I spent hundreds of dollars on books, books with a variety of topics, ranging from theology to meditations on the Psalms to church history to practical living out of faith, which is what I will cover in this post…in just a second.

 

It was in this restructuring and rebuilding time that I finally started to realize grace. Not to take advantage of it, mind you, which is something I still struggle with, but more that it’s by grace that we able to do anything: breathe, walk around, and, most importantly, be in relationship with the Father. It revolutionized everything I did and everything I do. I still can’t get enough of it, but I digress again. I was realizing all this stuff about grace but at the same time reading more stuff that caused me a great mental anguish.

 

It all started when I began reading The Secret Message of Jesus, which focuses solely on the Kingdom teaching of Jesus. Its points severely challenged my recently renovated faith, because I painfully realized that I (along with my church and the Church) know about Jesus, but we don’t really follow Jesus. My idea of Jesus transformed from what He did to what He is doing. The active faith of people in the new monastic movement, xxxchurch.com, and Rob Bell and Mars Hill shook me to my core. Here it is: people within the Body pushing for an ongoing Reformation of the Church that is adaptive to context and strives to be His hands and feet, focusing on the idea that Jesus was not an evangelist, but rather, He came with a message that He lived.

 

This stuff made me uncomfortable at first, mostly because it was so new and fresh, but then I realized that the reason that it made me uncomfortable was because the emerging church takes the focus so far away from doctrine and puts it squarely on action. In doing so, it takes the focus off of what one knows and instead puts it on what one does. The reason it makes me uncomfortable is because I don’t want to see how much the way I’m living doesn’t line up with the teachings of Jesus.

 

An interesting note: a message from Rob Bell of his series ‘Jesus Wants to Save Christians’ covers hell. It points out that the times Jesus talked about hell, He was always speaking to either the religious leaders of the time or His followers. Never once to the Gentiles or pagans or whatever. Always to religious people. There is a reason Jesus did this. People’s lives aren’t lining up with the words they profess so proudly. I am as guilty of this as any.

 

All that being said, however, I still am having an impossibly hard time reconciling our need for Jesus with action, social justice, and the like. I am having a difficult time realizing our need for grace (moreover, the need for everyone of grace) in light of this living the Gospel. Needing the Gospel vs. living the Gospel. Evangelism vs. working against social injustice. Matthew 28 vs. Isaiah 1.

 

I know that it’s a place I’ll never reach (the right balance), and, right now, it’s giving me a huge headache. But I think that as soon as I get the answer, like Bell says, “If we do definitively put God into words, we have at that moment made God into something God is not.” I think this is a conversation that is not only pretty darn interesting, but it is also a pretty necessary one for the Church to be having.

Born-Again Lazy? (Matthew 6:33)

The creators of xxxchurch.com, Craig Gross and J.R. Mahon, wrote Starving Jesus, a dialog about the offensive message of Jesus and how wrong the Church has it.

“The Chuch needs a good kick in the pants. We need to stop talking, meeting, deciding what’s next and get on with the business of evangelizing This country is the Holy Grail when it comes to evangelizing. We have the big fat First Amendment staring us in the face. The First Amendment guarantees us the right to offend in the name of Christ. So…who do you want to offend?

We are very blessed to have this faith in the United States, but we have grown soft on the truth. The Church has made certain subjects, places, and people offensive, and as a result, we do not talk about the offense. Or if we do, we condemn it in the name of Christ. Worldly offense can bear itself out in resentment, anger, and pride. It’s sin. We rarely dive into the world to deal with offense, instead preferring to bury it, hide it, run from it, and in extreme cases, protest or picket it.

As Christians, we ultimately look at our kids and scream back to the world who could care less, and we say, “Look what you’re doing to the kids!” as if they will suddenly have a moment and completely stop what they are doing. Offense must be met with truth, not with crazy, half-cocked personal opinions about what is right and what is wrong.

The word ‘offense’ has become the adjective that is used to define present-day Christianity. Offense has become a movement. We are not engaging truth with offense, we are using offense as a divining rod to find any given social problem and attack it. We look for the offense. We scrounge Scripture for its righteousness opposite, and off we go, emailing, calling, yelling, getting on TV, and basically letting the world know we ain’t gonna take it. Mad as hell, driven by self-righteous indignation. What a lovely picture we have painted for those looking for God.

The world has come to identify us by what we hate and what we are offended by, instead of what we love or why we love. We are offensive ones. Are we offending away from Christ or offending toward Him?”

The idea of the Kingdom of Heaven has blown my mind. It has revolutionized every ounce of my Christianity.

“This doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, and which plays so small a part in the Christian creeds, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.” – H.G. Wells
It’s offensive. It’s revolutionary. It’s violent. It’s beautiful.

And it’s advancing.

What if Jesus didn’t come to start another religion? What is He came to start a revolution? Most of His message was delivered outdoors or in people’s homes; if He was in a religious edifice, He was stirring up trouble, upsetting the status quo, pissing people off and calling them “children of the devil.” Jesus only mentions the word “church” three times in the Gospels, as opposed to the numerous mentions of the Kingdom of Heaven. So, so, so many descriptions of the Kingdom of Heaven, how it is at hand, how it is what Christians are to seek first, how it is what Jesus meant to “Love God and love others.” You can’t do one without doing the other.

Outreach, loving others, whatever you call it, is something that we as a Body, at least as the Body of Christ at ODU, absolutely suck at. (For anyone about to scroll down to write an irate comment pointing out how darn cynical I am, don’t bother. I know.) Whether it is in my church or any respective campus ministry, the focus is, nine times out of ten, on discipleship, personal growth, issues that we sinners deal with. Don’t get me wrong, that’s awesome, as well as biblical.

No, the problem arises when we Christians who are born-again lazy (as Gross puts it) are so caught up in becoming better Christians, dealing with the rough, tough world we live in, we fall so in love with our own spirituality that we reach a point where we have a faith that says all the right things and believes all the right things but is dead, empty, void. The real faith is a faith that reaches out, that is outward-focused. I can cite countless authors that point this out: R. York Moore, Voss, Bell…but obviously, the most perfect example of this is Jesus. Jesus was bent on loving others and it cost Him His life. Can we believe in Him and not do the same?

What kind of mentality does the Church have?

“An ‘empire’ mentality is one which is governed by church growth. It says that the only projects into which it is worth channelling time or money are those that will grow the investing church. Churches governed by an empire mentality tend to see other churches as competition, and are often predominately inflexible and programme-oriented. An inevitable by-product of this approach to church is a self-serving attitude and an inward focus; protecting what already exists at the expense of that which is yet to be discovered. An overriding strategy of the empire-driven church is that of absorption.

A Kingdom mentality, on the other hand, is inherently outward focused, people-centred and naturally flexible. Motivated by a desire to see the oppressed set free, the Kingdom-focused church will give away that which God has given to it, seeking to bring God’s Kingdom to the area it is serving by working together with other churches to actively serve communities. A Kingdom focus results in a realisation of our obligation and commitment to the poor, the ‘have not’s’, and in a pursuit of the Kingdom, seeks to overthrow the powers that promote oppression, both spiritual and physical. A principle strategy of the Kingdom-focused church is that of dissemination.” – ServantBlog 7/6/06

Beautiful. This post rambled and didn’t make any sense. Maybe future ones will be more coherent.

Revolutionary literature pertaining to the Church probably isn’t something I need to be reading. Sorry, Shane.