When Doctrine Divides Christians Who Aren't Wrong

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer and I'm joined again by Dr. Ashish Varma. For those of you who aren't watching, I'm not in the studio today and so if my audio sounds a little bit strange, it's because I don't have my regular nice little mic set up. I am using a wonderful pair of wireless headphones to do this episode. So hopefully everything will come out okay. But today we are going to be talking a little bit about another aspect of the diagnosis that Ashish and I have talked about previously in a previous episode. And this one is called fragmentation. And what we mean by fragmentation is really when Christians begin to pull apart, not because one group has become heretical or not because one group has done something that's inappropriate. there are appropriate times for such divisions. But in this case, what we're really looking at is the way that legitimate doctrinal positions or institutions or traditions or practices or people may end up driving us apart. And so we're really thinking about fragmentation of faithful believers from one another simply on the basis of something like a different idiom of expression as opposed to a theological error. And so that's what we're going to be diving into today. Biblically, you know, she's not talked about a number of different things. Bible passages where we might go to find something like this. Um, first Corinthians one came to mind, you know, I follow Paul, I follow Apollos. Um, she brought up, uh, Colossians, the book of Colossians and some of the doctrinal controversies there. Um, we could obviously go to Romans 14 and 15, but it almost feels like, um, part of what we're going to end up doing is we're going to end up thinking through church history an awful lot more today than maybe going to specific biblical passages and really rooting this principle in a specific biblical example, because sociologically, this seems to have happened to the church over time, whereas biblically, the divisions aren't necessarily exactly what we're talking about today. That be fair in your mind, Ashish?

00:02:56
Speaker 2: I think so, yeah. I think church history is a right place to begin to understand some of the pressures we feel today to divide on very neat lines, but then also understand how the fragmentation doesn't just happen between larger movements, such as the Roman Catholics and the Baptists, but also then within Roman Catholics and Baptists and Lutherans and so on and so forth. And I think along with that, you have Maybe just a simple human reality. Probably not a human reality that we'd say exists in its best sense pre-fall. But certainly in humanity as we know it, there has been a long tendency, whether Christian or not, to begin to see very precise lines of exclusion based upon some set of circumstances. It could be something as simple as, we are the people of here, and you are not. I think about many of the groups of First Nations peoples, their names for themselves, such as the people that we call the Apaches today, their names for themselves were the people, hard stop. That's the rough translation. And their neighboring people who, by the way, looked more or less like them. So they're not thinking in racial terms the way that we do today of looks like me, doesn't look like me. But their neighbors also saw themselves as the people. But when looking at each other, they were both not the people. And that's not a First Nations thing alone. You can go anywhere in the world. You have this tendency to begin to group to the exclusion of other people. And the Christian phenomena starts to do that around ideas, which is something I think we want to talk about that's interesting and in some ways unique.

00:04:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll share this story just to kind of illustrate that I think the point we're getting to. But I had applied for a job with the Southern Denomination Association probably in 2005 now. So, I mean, it's been forever ago. And it happened to be in my hometown, my home county. And I was not Southern Baptist at the time. I knew one of the pastors of the church down there. He knew what I was doing as far as theological school. We talked. He felt really comfortable with me. And so I applied for this position. I was going through the interview process, but I was not Southern Baptist. I'd made the decision not to go to a Southern Baptist church where I was living and join that church for a month so that I could just have the denominational label and then go apply for this position. I just kind of figured, well, If there's doctrinal agreement, if there's an understanding that I align with the denomination, then obviously when I come down and I'm working for the Southern Baptist Church, I would be a member of the Southern Baptist Church. And at the time, I thought that seemed reasonable. But when I got to this bigger association meeting where all these different pastors and delegates from the various congregations were there, one of the pastors stood up and said something to the effect of, I don't want anyone in this position who would not bleed for the Southern Baptist faith. And he said it just like that, that last part, bleed for the Southern Baptist faith was the quote. And I remember sort of thinking and processing in that moment, number one, I'm probably not going to get this job because his statement was followed by a number of amens. But the second part was, I was really That was the first time I'd ever really been confronted with someone who is dividing the body of Christ in this way. That there was something so distinct, not culturally about Southern Baptists, but about the Southern Baptist faith that would create a separation where I was an outsider as a Christian, as someone who'd gone to conservative schools. I'd gone to Moody and Wheaton at that time, was pursuing, getting ready to pursue my PhD at Trinity. These are squarely evangelical institutions. These are not, you know, liberal in any sense. You know, I was not liberal in any sense. And yet I was excluded in that moment. And so I would say it wasn't about me not getting the job. Right. Plenty of reasons to say, hey, this guy doesn't understand the Southern Baptist culture. He doesn't you know, he doesn't go to a Southern Baptist church. We'd really like somebody who understands these things. So, you know, because I was going to be working across the different churches. That would have made sense to me. But the believing for Southern Baptist faith made no sense to me. I still don't fully grasp what the Southern Baptist faith is in distinction to, let's say, the Missouri Synod Lutheran faith or the Presbyterian Church USA faith or the non-denominational Bible Church faith. Those are all the same faith to me. There is only one faith. I understand there's doctrinal distinctions, but to me, those doctrinal distinctions aren't in, shouldn't be divisive in the way that it ended up being in that case. And so hopefully that illustrates a little bit of what we're trying to get at and how these things can sort of create identities on their own, where you have an in-group and an out-group. And so what ends up happening is that you're not just, um, judged less fit than someone else for a job, you're actually recognized as an alien and stranger who does not belong within this community, this body of believers. You're now excluded and outside of that. So like I said, hopefully that gives people a little bit of an illustration of what we're talking about here, that sort of fragmentation of the body of Christ where regardless of doctrinal agreement, my lack of affiliation with the Southern Baptist Church was really the problem. Yeah.

00:09:03
Speaker 2: And to be clear, I think you and I would agree that there is a value to having certain lines.

00:09:09
Speaker 1: Sure, sure.

00:09:11
Speaker 2: And there might even be a value to having certain positions that are holding up those lines on a very narrow basis. I think of a friend of mine who taught at a specifically denominational school for many years. And we had a conversation that I think we came at it from different angles. My frustration with another school was an overly narrowing of boundaries such that we were treating those super narrow boundaries as if this is the only way in which we can properly articulate belonging to the body of Christ.

00:09:45
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:09:46
Speaker 2: And I would to this day say, if that's the way that we're articulating boundaries, I think there's a problem in that.

00:09:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.

00:09:53
Speaker 2: His counterpoint to me was you know accepting that that could be a problem there's a value to being able to say we have a community so he was part of the crc tradition and he wanted to say if we have a particular program or school that's committed to the historic values of the christian reformed church then we need to have people who enter into it that have a certain level of buy-in, not because what we're saying is those outside the CRC are inherently problematic in their faith, but because we're trying to uphold that. And I thought that's a fair way of articulating it, right? So what we're trying to get at here is that when, and I'm not making a comment on the CRC, I don't know the ins and outs of this particular tradition as it relates to cooperation with others, but generally speaking, what particularly intrigues us, and I think what gets to the heart of your story that you just gave, is when there becomes levels of suspicion entering in. So that what we have now is an overly narrowing level for what counts to be a follower of Christ. Where we begin to think, oh, you're a Lutheran. Or even within Lutheran circles, oh, you're a Missouri Synod. Such that we begin to wonder, does that mean you're even a follower of Jesus? I hear this when my kids ask questions, we're not Roman Catholic, but they begin to ask questions of, so are Catholics Christians? I said, yeah, insofar as they profess Christ, of course they're Christians, right? So we think about early in the church, there's a reason that we have the genealogies of traditions to this day, right? I'll tell my kids, there's a reason we're not Roman Catholic, and we can go into those various reasons. But that's very different than saying they are not followers of Jesus, the Son of God, the second person of the triune God, right, who came to save us from our sins, to bring about the process of reconciliation for all of creation, right? These are core issues. So, when we think about the early church where Of course, there were these important councils. We tend to know of seven of them as the ecumenical councils. And by ecumenical, we just mean that the known part of the church within the larger influence of the Roman Empire was joined together in a commitment to expressing what are those core elements of their unity, right? What made them the church that followed Jesus. There were certainly other councils and what prevented them from rising to the level of ecumenical is that the church realized they represented the interests of a local group and only a local group and couldn't rightfully be said to represent the entirety of the body of Christ versus those seven, at least again in that known Roman Empire world, represent whether you were in the Spanish regions in the far west of the empire or you were in the southernmost reaches of the African reach of the empire, or you're in the easternmost reaches in the Middle East of the empire, or as far north as Germany, or what we think of as Germany today, in the northern reaches of the empire, these claims were supposed to be something that said you could recognize the church that follows Jesus in all of these places. Now, that doesn't mean they were perfect in their proclamations and what they were doing, right? There's certainly been traditions that follow that have concerns with some of those ecumenical claims, one of them being, of course, icons. One of the ecumenical agreements was that icons were acceptable. Not all Christians today want.

00:13:53
Speaker 1: To affirm that.

00:13:55
Speaker 2: But the point was that these were boundaries that were being erected not as a fine division between followers of Christ, but in order to demarcate what does it mean to profess Jesus as the Son of God God in the flesh, God's self, right? And reconciler of creation to God's self.

00:14:19
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think there's value in having some of the distinctions. I don't have any problem with that. I think the other part of this that I would say is a problem with the distinctions. I'll use this analogy. It's almost like inbreeding. like you only date within your own family, right? We don't do that. We like to have, you know, a broader perspective on who our kids should date or who we should marry. And like that practice went out a long, long time ago. As we form these units, it does create a dynamic in which we tend to stay within those units. We tend to stay within those boundaries. And even though we say, well, we're trying to preserve a heritage here, There's a subtle fragmentation that takes place because we're only ever really interacting within that tradition. And I think that can be also problematic. So I'm for the distinctions. I have no issue with, for instance, I know the Lutherans have a different perspective on baptism, let's say, than Baptists might. the various forms of Baptist we could throw out there. I know they have a different understanding of that. Now, is it possible that you could have a church that's practicing both forms? Sure, you probably could. But it's also not necessary that you would. And so I think that there is an appropriateness to a community of practice rooted in different doctrinal beliefs. I just happen to think that we have to put in a little bit more effort to bridge the gaps between those traditions so that the traditions don't become so insular that it ultimately develops into, even though confessionally people might not say it, like, hey, this other group isn't Christian. I think in practice it feels that way. And so there is a subtle sort of fragmentation that happens even when we form these groups. I think it's not essentially evil. I think it's a consequence of the particular structure that we've adopted. And it's something that we need to be thinking through and aware of so that we can counteract the tendency, if that makes sense. It does.

00:16:45
Speaker 2: Can you say a little bit more about what you think that structure is that you see it as a consequence of?

00:16:51
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I think, I mean, we both worked at denominational, not denominational schools. We both worked in non-denominational schools. we both attended non-denominational schools. Wheaton College is a non-denominational school, as far as I know. You know, Moody Bible Institute, where I did my MDiv, was a non-denominational school. Trinity was associated with E3, right? But within those institutions, and they didn't, yeah, right. It was much broader. And so I would say, though, that Wheaton was, uh, more strongly academic and thus I think a bit more ecumenical. Um, Moody was, um, more closed off. And there was a sense I can remember sitting when I was doing my MDiv at Moody, sitting in the lunchroom and listening to some of my fellow MDiv students sitting there talking with the professor and basically, um, asking the question of whether Reformed theology is heretical. Moody's a dispensational school. I don't know what conclusion they ever came to, but you can see how these sort of things would raise up de facto. Because we're segmenting ourselves and because we're deciding on our own doctrinal statements, we begin to develop a vested interest in those doctrinal distinctives, as opposed to recognizing them for what they are. Plausible if not plausible, legitimate readings of the biblical text, constructed back over into doctrine, and the biblical text isn't infinitely plausible, and so it's not infinitely pliable, rather. So there are going to be boundaries, there are going to be limits to what can be developed, but I think it starts to become too insular, and you start to forget that your doctrinal formulation isn't simply plausible and legitimate, you start to think of it as authoritative and bracketing. And so you get these sort of statements that, you know, certain other positions may or may not be heretical. I would say like at one point, you know, complementarian and egalitarian issues when we talked about them during my MDiv, very similar feel. You began to think of egalitarians as heretics, not as people who held a separate position than yours, but were still Christians. You began to think of these kind of folks as the wrong kind of folks. I think it's very difficult, in other words, to construct these social relationships without creating black sheep within the social matrix. And that creates a certain level of fragmentation. It also creates a certain level of what we might call a social hierarchy, right? Where some people are more dead center and other people are more deviant. Um, I was always more deviant, honestly. I think part of it was the tattoos. Um, it's just like, I did, I did things differently. I thought differently. I acted differently. Part of it was that I didn't grow up in Christian culture. I came to it much later. So I didn't really understand what the finer points were. And so I was always a little bit more deviant, but you could, you could feel as being pushed even, you know, partly to the margins as I was, you could see how, you know, a legacy pastor's kid was going to have way different opportunities than somebody like me who's coming to this completely fresh and is a little strange is ever going to have within that community. And you could tell that I was going to get away with far less than the pastor's kid was going to get by with. Right. And so you have these sort of I think that's the dynamic that I'm talking about. And hopefully that gives a sense of the structure that I'm talking about. Whenever we divide ourselves, have a denomination, have a doctrinally distinct college of some sort, whatever. Again, those structures aren't evil. They're not bad necessarily, but we have to be aware of the dynamics that are created within them and actively work to counteract those dynamics.

00:21:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's helpful. It brings up a lot of, side questions that I think are related, um, that I didn't actually expect us to go there, but I'm going to, I'm going to do it anyway. Pull me back if I go too far out. Um, I think about the work of, uh, the great 20th century theologian, George Lindbeck. Um, so his, his main work, the nature of doctrine or his most popular work, um, Which, incidentally, for those out there who know of Kevin Van Hooser, his work, The Drama of Doctrine, which is probably his most significant work, is a deliberate play off of that. In some ways, he's following in the line of what George Limbeck did, in some ways pivoting and trying to draw lines a little bit differently. But similar sorts of projects. And what is that project? Well, the project is, how do we begin to understand, in some ways, we could say the democratization of faith. Yeah. You think about the early church, which was heavily elder-driven, and elder transcended the boundaries of one particular local congregation. I think a lot of times, especially in lower church evangelical settings, we tend to think of the elders as a people in one church. And that's sort of the boundary of their influence and what they're doing. But in, in the early church, there was a much more deeply intertwined reality to the life of elders. And it's formalized in the form of thing, you know, the formal structure of bishops that eventually gives way to things like archbishops and then eventually in the Western church cardinals. And then of course the head of that ends up being in the Western church, the Pope, um, within that structure, let me say this, that structure is meant to be in some ways a protector of authority, right? Someone outside of that structure could say anything they wanted to when they pick up the Bible. Why do we count that or not count that as good teaching? And the answer can't just simply be because well, we are the people in this church with this group of elders. So that structure was meant to protect that, right? But of course, as we know, the fragmentation was already present prior to the Protestant Reformation. You have the fragmentation creeping up in the early church such that the culmination of that is a division in the East and the West between right, between those churches that began to follow the leadership of Constantinople, which became Byzantium, which becomes Istanbul. And even that set of churches has a looser sense of centralized authority, right? So you think about the churches that come out of that. The Greek Orthodox and the Ukrainian Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox and the Syrian Orthodox, among others, aren't quite so centrally unified and the way that we think of what happens in the Western church under the papacy.

00:24:51
Speaker 1: Right.

00:24:51
Speaker 2: So there are real divisions between the Ukrainian and the Russian Orthodox church that has resulted in real political issues that, that animate the lives of Ukrainian and Russian, uh, governments and citizens.

00:25:05
Speaker 1: Right.

00:25:06
Speaker 2: Nevermind the other Eastern Orthodox churches and the West you have ultimately, I mean, you have, you have a lot of, uh, back and forth. I think yesterday or maybe today was the anniversary of the death, I believe, of the last alternate pope in the Western world. So you have this period known as the Babylonian captivity of the church where there's multiple people claiming to be pope. So the history pre-reformation of the papacy isn't even quite as unified as we might be led to believe. And that different set of popes also brings about Different sets of cardinals that support that pope, which means a different set of structure as to what bishops have to and priests have to report to, right? But ultimately, you get the Protestant Reformation, and the Reformation brings in that deepest sense of fragmentation, particularly in the Western Church, that just starts to explode, right? Especially in the Americas, and especially in the United States, and especially in upstate New York in the early 1800s. something was in the water in upstate New York, but you get this explosion of denominational differences that to this day has continued to run amok, right? Our denominations aren't done dividing. They continue to divide and the issues are newer and newer. And what George Limbeck wanted to say is how do we begin to understand how this doctrine functions in this increasingly fragmented reality? How does someone who's nevermind two different groups of Lutherans. How does someone who's a Lutheran begin to communicate with someone who's a Baptist? They have very different starting points. They have very different understandings of political reality. And I don't mean Democrat or Republican, but I mean, how does the church relate to the ongoing civil life of its practitioners?

00:27:01
Speaker 1: Right.

00:27:03
Speaker 2: They have very different understandings of centralized authority. And those are precursors to the more obvious things, the very different understandings of things like how does baptism work? How does the Lord's Supper work? What precisely is the thing going on when we say that someone is justified by faith? Even as we talk about Baptists and Lutherans, for instance, being members of the Protestant larger umbrella, they still don't actually quite precisely agree right so you have these things that some people would say is overly academic discourse called the ordo salutis the order of salvation you have all these different ways of formulating that's really trying to get at what's going on when we say grace touches someone how significant is faith and what exactly is going on in faith right luther was and the lutheran tradition in some parts are very concerned for intellect intellectualizing works Is faith just an intellectual work in ways that I think many evangelicals and neo-evangelicals and neo-Calvinists don't seem to have the same level of concern about that? This is all to put a very fine point on what George Lindbeck's problem was. And what he's trying to work through with his ecumenical mindedness is how can we begin to honor that these traditions form in specific ways, in specific places, with specific vocabularies? That aren't precisely the same as the use of maybe the same terms in other traditions, right? While allowing for the possibility of learning from each other, talking to each other, recognizing that we're all speaking of the same Jesus in the same historic ways as the Son of God, second person of the Trinity, incarnate in the flesh as fully God, fully man, right? And so his nature of doctrine is trying to work through those. And Kevin Van Hooser's follow-up, The Drama of Doctrine, is really trying to do the same thing with his own emphases of saying, what does this mean when we get to scripture? If the papacy has the structure of ultimately saying what the College of Cardinals and the papacy decide is ultimately what's canonized as the teaching of the church. These are the non-negotiables. Protestants don't have that. So we continue to say, well, what the scriptures say, but.

00:29:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:29:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:30:03
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah when I think that when we think about some of this we're part of what I'd like to guard against is kind of what we've ultimately called conditions and I think inversion is a condition here so there's the fragmentation that happens because we are disagreeing we decide to part amicably and And as we part amicably, we create communities around these doctrinal distinctions that now don't communicate across. And there's an insularity that happens and a language, for lack of a better term, that develops. Because what was it? A cultural linguistic approach that Lindbeck did, right? I think I'm remembering that correctly. This basically... A Lutheran is going to talk through these things and mean something different by the terms that are used than a Baptist or a non-denominational person or whomever. They just have a slightly different language. The words are often the same, but the concepts underneath those words are slightly different. And so as we sort of faction off, what we begin to lose is the willingness and or ability to wrestle with those terms. and to really deeply understand what the other person is saying. So there's either sort of this sort of anemic acceptance that what they're saying is what we're saying, or there's just an unwillingness to engage it because they're obviously wrong. So I think that part sort of develops. But then I think there's this other sort of problematic condition or dynamic that comes into this, which is inversion. All of a sudden, the doctrines, is no longer conversant with other communities or with the biblical text itself. And so there's a sense in which what's inverted is if the Bible is supposed to be a top, it's supposed to be the final authority for life and faith governing the way that we think and believe, the doctrine is sort of slipped on top of it so that now the Bible is read solely through this grid. And when there's a text that creates problems for a doctrine, it is, uh, domesticated, let's say, right. To the doctrinal stance that's put on top of it. Um, there's probably a number of different instances we could go to for this. Um, I'll go for a, a quasi controversial one, I guess, but, um, you know, when we think about something like, um, We've talked about this, how she's God in time. One of the passages I almost always go to is Genesis 22. And so there's a hermeneutic approach. I'll explain this for people on the podcast. There's a hermeneutical approach that would say, hey, we value grammar and genre and historical understandings of the test. And so it's the historical grammatical hermeneutic. Even if you haven't heard that phrase, you've probably seen this done. And so the question becomes is then how do you balance genre, grammar, historical context, cultural milieu in which, you know, a given thing, you know, when do you bring in for your Old Testament interpretations, when do you bring in ancient Near Eastern cognates, those kind of things. And students, usually when I'm teaching early hermeneutics classes, they think they have a general idea of this and they think that the grammar, the smallest sentence structure, should always be privileged, right? What the text says should always be the first thing. And so I take him to Genesis 22, and Abraham is about to plunge the knife into Isaac's chest, and the angel of the Lord comes down, speaking for God and says, now I know that you are one who fears God. And you just sit back and you're like, grammatically what this means is that now, not before, now, God knows. He didn't know before. It creates all of these huge problems. It's a real tension. Like the biblical text creates a real tension. Now there's various ways to resolve that tension or to lessen that tension. But the reality is that if we're, when the text does something like that to us, right, we shouldn't just ignore it. We can't just domesticate it and say, well, obviously it just means this. Like there's a wrestling that should be taking place. And my concern is that when we start to do the inversions and when we start to say, well, here's our doctrinal statement, here's our theological system, here's our broad-based hermeneutic, that now we're making the biblical text to fit our hermeneutic, which inverts the authority structure. All of a sudden, our hermeneutic, our doctrine, our system is governing the biblical text and the way that it's to be read. There's some appropriateness to that, but I think we have to be very cautious to negotiate the boundaries between appropriate use of frameworks and grids and understandings coming in and informing the biblical text versus inappropriate ways of not allowing the biblical text to correct, revise, and force us to rethink some of our belief systems or hermeneutics or understandings. Because it is really the authority. And so I realize that is part of what Lindbeck is trying to solve. But I think it's worth sort of throwing out there, just naming this problem, because oftentimes what I see when I see or when I've experienced groups that are that tend to be a little bit more insular and isolated, fragmented off from the body of Christ. where it's like, yeah, you can hang around with us, but if you really wanted to be part of us, you'd believe in young earth creationism, and you'd believe in a strictly dispensational hermeneutic, or you'd believe that Babylon is Babylon, not some sort of symbol for Rome in Revelation. All these different components start to come in, and you're like, well, I don't understand why those things are even important to believe as a test of faith. But for them, it isn't necessarily, they would say it's not a test of faith, but they would say is no, it's just, it's just, you know, sort of buy-in, right. To participate in our community. But the problem is that when that community becomes so insular, it really does feel like you're just leaving people out in the cold. Like this is the real Christian community and everybody else is sort of like second-class citizens.

00:37:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:37:08
Speaker 2: That's, I'm, I like your use of Genesis as a concrete way to think about this because it, there's a few things that come to my mind, both with your conclusion and with your use of that passage. When we look at that Genesis 22, I believe you said, right? Now I know. It creates a tension, but I wonder, I guess, does it create a, is that tension within the text? Does the text feel that tension? And I, yeah, right. So my, My inclination is to say I don't feel that tension in the text. That's something in front of the text. Understanding the Hebraic mind will help us understand why that tension or why that passage speaks the way that it does. And maybe learning within that of what that tension is. But there's this other part of me, I'm also the contrarian, right? Like you, where I want to say, how in the world? I have enough trouble understanding the people that live around me. You know, when my son has a certain kind of emotional reaction that he does, I have a hard time understanding him, and I'd venture to say that I'm probably among the people that know my son the best in the whole world, right?

00:38:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:53
Speaker 2: How in the world am I going to understand, several thousand years ago, Hebraic mindset? Yeah, yeah. So there's problem number one within that. But then two within that of having to understand that in front of the text dynamic doesn't change. Regardless of my understanding of the Hebraic mindset, this is a reality in front of the text. It's me reading the text. It's you reading the text. And especially when we have this tradition and this understanding of the living text that God continues to speak into, you can't just bracket. out in front of the text, right? We are really trying to say, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard spoke of the problem of trying to seek objectivity is that we're trying to seek something outside of my place. And it's a problem because I ultimately want to know something from my place because it's from my place that I live and move and breathe and have to live my life. So if I understand a text from outside of my place, what good is that to me who's trying to live that text in my place, right? That's the short of what Kierkegaard's looking at. And I think he's right about that problem that he's publicizing by saying our aim is wrong. But it is worth analyzing to say Why is that a tension here and now? And a lot of work has been done to show that maybe that says more about us. Maybe it says more about our traditions. Maybe it says more about this thing that we call classical theism and where it came from. Where do these assumptions about God come from? Do they come from the text or do they come from Greek philosophy? And increasingly, I think it's fair to say a lot of these assumptions come from Greek philosophy. Okay, well, what do we do with that? You have people working within that tradition, like the open theists, who'd say, well, then God just doesn't know. end of problem. Or you have people like the open or the process theologians, you might say, well, we're God is God. God self is already also on this journey of self-discovery and creation and history become mechanisms of self-discovery, right? That's a step significantly beyond what open theos say. But I wonder, And I don't have an answer to this, but I wonder how that Hebraic person hearing Genesis 22 wandering in the desert or on their way into wandering into the desert after having coming out of Egypt, hears that. Do they hear that and they think, oh, wait a minute. So you didn't know before? And my guess is they didn't stop and ask that question. Doesn't mean we shouldn't, but it just says more about them, right? So what Lindbeck's trying to get at is, Part of this conversation is recognizing– I'll use the language of Dan Block. Many years ago, I said this when I was in grad school. That often the things that we write down as the biggest questions that animate the intensity within which we create this fragmentation are themselves already things that were written down with pencil. And if we don't recognize they're written down with pencil, we fail to recognize the provisionality.

00:42:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:42:09
Speaker 2: Yeah. defines the discourse. And this question gets at what's really at stake. And this question is what I have to enculturate people into. And if I can't enculturate them into this, then they're on the outside.

00:42:54
Speaker 1: Right?

00:42:55
Speaker 2: When at the end of the day, we'd say, wait, so regardless of what I think of the open theist, I don't tend to buy open theism, but what is the open theist saying about Jesus? Still sounds like what, the early church set up as the big questions of, are you really following the Jesus? Are you saying of Jesus, what ultimately matters for the larger declaration of who Jesus is, you know?

00:43:23
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I, here's what I find interesting is, you know, just as you're talking there, you know, we, we talk about these, there's a fundamental sort of starting point that most of us come or that many people come to a text with. Now I, I, Like I said, I hadn't grown up really in a Christian context before I went to seminary. And so I went in and had no real clue what any of these things were. Like I didn't know what dispensational or covenant theology was. I didn't know what complementarian versus egalitarian theology was. I didn't like these bigger categories of doctrinal kind of things. I didn't fully grasp. I didn't understand what was going on. I had some catching up to do. And so while I have a working knowledge of some of that now, even like Calvinism and Arminianism, I also had the benefit of walking in cold. I had no idea what I was looking at. And so instead of sitting down and saying, well, let me get out of systematic theology and read all about this, I started my MDiv, which is a very moody kind of thing. You just start reading your Bible. And so I got used to just letting the text sort of do whatever it was going to do. Right. I'm not saying I read the Bible better than everybody else, but by not having those systematic categories, there's a part of me that when I hit Genesis 22, that it really didn't bother me. Right. Like I'm just reading this story of Abraham's test of faith and like sort of being immersed within it and just allowing that story to do whatever it's going to do to me. And I think that there is a part of this where if we start to recognize that the word of God was given to us in a non-systematized fashion. And so there's value to systemization. There's value to constructing theology and doctrine. But the reality is that the Bible doesn't do that. We do that. And so the Bible is doing something else to us. It's being presented to us in a different fashion. And so just allowing it to be read on its own, on its own terms, in the way that it's conveyed, I think is an important aspect of this. That doesn't mean that I would ever say, hey, never construct doctrine, never do systematics. This is all ridiculous. I think there have to be ways in which we put this thing together. So that we can give people handles so that when they go and read it, they can understand it intelligibly. But at the same time, I think you want to hold on fairly loosely to those handles. To your point, like it's written in pencil. And so when you hit these texts, you're not just so consumed with, oh my gosh, what does this do to my system? It's a question of what is God's word saying? And what are the implications of what it's saying at this point? And so we have to start thinking through that lens, I think. You know, it sounds like I'm sort of being wishy-washy, I think, on, oh, let's just all read our Bibles, right? I think there are guardrails that are necessary. I sort of lament the loss of some sort of teaching office or some way of sort of entering into the text. But I also think that any way we enter into the text is ultimately going to skew the way that we read the text itself. And this is why we have a plurality of voices reading the text in a variety of different ways that we can learn from one another, disagree with one another, argue with one another, but ultimately remain united with one another. And I think that's part of the art that we're losing. We're losing this art of negotiation. Where we sit back and say, no, that's clearly something that the Bible stands against. And there are those things versus there's a there's a space here where multiple views can be really plausible. And we have no idea which one is like actually the way it should be practiced or if any of them are the way they should be practiced. Right. Any one of them is the way it should be practiced. And I just think there's that art of negotiation, that willingness to have discourse around these matters is something that would begin to combat the sort of fragmentation that I'm concerned that we're developing more and more in the church.

00:48:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, a couple thoughts. One, to clarify, and I know you know this, but just I think it bears worth mentioning that So you came to the text without sort of these systematic categories that are often given. It doesn't mean you were coming from some placeless existence, right? You still came with questions. You still came with who you are, right? So it's not as if it's some sort of non-located, non-specific reading. And I know you know that, but it's worth saying that the answer here isn't just simply to say, well, you know, spend a few years and divest yourselves of all doctrinal content and now go back and read it because now you read it yeah like that's not necessarily not at all there's a lot to be brought from traditions but the key point here that you're making is again i think this has become the lindbeck episode um is i think the point that lindbeck's trying to make too right so then when he sets up what doctrine is while trying to give you that sort of um.

00:49:04
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. traditions.

00:49:10
Speaker 2: His goal is to say, understand what this doctrine is. And so he calls it, his language is its second order. And we've talked about this before, but his basic idea of saying its second order is to say, it's not the thing itself. And this is where the trouble comes in, as you're saying, where we begin to forget that doctrine is something derived from the text by local readings, codified in traditions and communities.

00:49:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:49:39
Speaker 2: And it is the thing itself.

00:49:42
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:49:44
Speaker 2: As an example, as a totally, well, I shouldn't say non-theological, but seemingly way off topic reading. I remember a few years ago, I don't know this woman. She lives apparently on my block, but around the corner. I couldn't, if you put her in a lineup, I wouldn't recognize her. I just like that. That side of the block I've never had really interactions with. One of my neighbors was talking about this woman who evidently was divorced some years before. And her ex-husband was a longtime friend of this neighbor of mine. And this neighbor kept referring to this lady as crazy, as mean, as horrible. And as this neighbor described it, it became very clear to me, like, Oh, so you got all this information from your friend, who is the one who's divorced from this woman. And now when you look at this woman, there's no texture, there's no gradients. She bad, he good. She crazy, he sane. Now we can all slip into this tendency, right? But for me, as someone who had just had no meat in this fight... what this neighbor of mine was saying started to sound suspicious. I was like, I see. So I'm supposed to treat this woman as a pariah, as this crazy person, because your friend, who is her ex-husband, said all this stuff to you that undoubtedly is heavily emotionally weighted, right?

00:51:34
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:51:35
Speaker 2: And you've just accepted it because you were his friend, right? So as a result, I become a member of the cloud. Okay, you have the emotional reason to be tied to this narrative as the friend of the person who's giving you the narrative. I now, who have no emotional connection to it, am supposed to begin to develop that emotional baggage because you told me this story based on no knowledge except for what this one person said to you, right? And for me, that was a quick bow out. Like, okay, take it with a grain of salt. And even to this day, I've had no interactions with any of these, either of these people in this former couples dispute, I guess. So it means nothing to me.

00:52:14
Speaker 1: Right.

00:52:14
Speaker 2: But now you can imagine the other side, right? You can imagine her doing the same thing and the cloud that exists because of what she said. And it just goes bigger and bigger. I think this, I mean, this is really how the algorithm works in social media, right? It creates a cloud of people who are increasingly distanced from the source material. And now you've got, if it works, right? Like if I were to buy into it, now I begin to have the emotional baggage tied into it so that I have this strong inclination to say, oh, that person's evil or that thought process is evil, right? In some ways, again, this is what Lindbeck is talking about that I hear you saying as well, right? Doctrine loses its place. The people formulating the doctrine are trying to say, we're trying to wrestle with this narrative of the text and all these things that go around the narrative. It's not strictly narrative, but the overarching thing is a narrative, and we're trying to wrestle with it, and the doctrine is a second-order thing that says something about it. But the deeper you get into that cloud, what you're left with is the second-order doctrine becomes the thing. And that's the thing that Limbeck's trying to knock down and say, I'm not saying do away with the doctrine. I want you to understand what the nature of doctrine is, as the title says. And if we begin to understand what the nature of the doctrine is, maybe now we can actually get back to the first order reality, the narrative itself. Maybe if it's an interpersonal thing, if I really had a stake in this, I go to that woman who is now apparently the crazy person, I say, hey, I want you to know that I've heard these things about you. I have no reason to think anything one way or the other, but I want you to know that I'm your neighbor. Maybe I should have done that, but honestly, our lives never crossed. I'm just not a part of that conversation. It's neither here nor there to me. And if I saw her in the grocery store or if I saw her on a walk, I wouldn't even know that that's who we're talking about here. So the doctrine bears nothing on her from my perspective in a way that it does for those within that cloud. But that's not to say the doctrine doesn't matter. Maybe she is crazy, right? But maybe there's more texture to that than just simply, I belong to this cloud that has made the thing itself obscured by the doctrine that's been constructed around it.

00:54:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's really helpful. I saw a study here not too long ago about people who sign petitions online. And it's sort of fascinating the way it works. People who sign petitions online tend to have these shared characteristics, and I'm not going to remember all of them, but they Let's say they tend to watch the news every day. They tend to be on Twitter. And I think there are a couple of other characteristics. And so the general idea of the article was that these people who sign petitions, they're part of this sort of cycle, reinforcing cycle. So the news will start reporting on something that'll make this something seem more important. They see it again on Twitter. They get the petition out. They sign the petition. As the petition gains signatures, the news reports on the petition, right? And it just sort of cycles around like this. And I think in some ways that's what we end up doing with doctrine. That's sort of that insular loop, right, that we end up getting into within the church. And that is part of what we've got to sort of resist against. I'm with you. I don't want to get rid of doctrine. But I do take Lindbeck's point really seriously. We need to understand what it is. You know, there's a difference between, and I think, you know, I had to learn this really early on as a theological student, especially in the area I was in, like biblical scholarship. Yes, there's a way to be, I always wanted to be right. Like, let me get this right. Because it's important. So you kind of want to get it right. In my older age, I've moved to, let me get this plausible. Let me do an appropriate reading of the text. That's a shift in language that's a serious shift in attitude and posture. Because getting it right assumes an awful lot. And I think part of what it assumes is that you've narrowed down the question so far that you can get it right. Because as we've talked about, I think we've used this analogy on the show before. The Bible is like glitter. Right? My daughters used to play with glitter when they were kids. And you'd never get that stuff up off the floor. You'd think you'd have it, and then you'd go back and you'd find glitter all over the place. It just keeps popping up. It spontaneously combusts as glitter or something. Here it is. But I think I think that way about the biblical text an awful lot. I can read a text that I've read a hundred times and understand it differently this time when I come back to it. That's the glitter. And so getting it right, I think sometimes we assume that we can close off this interpretation of the text. We can say, now we have this text mastered. We understand it perfectly. There's no remainder in that text for us to learn anything new from. And I think that that's a little bit dangerous. And so I've sort of tried to shift my language and my posture. And I think that the whole church would do well to sort of shift in that direction to understand that. Yeah. I think our understandings are very plausible. I think they provide, um, boundaries that will, um, you know, like something like the Nicene Creed, um, Nicene Creed might even be a great example, right? Um, this was my understanding of it. And you correct me if I'm wrong. This is why the Eastern Orthodox church sort of, um, steps away from the other arms of Christendom is because you have the spirit proceeding, uh, proceeding from the sun, um, you know, the, the Philly. Okay. And that was a later addition, right? And that addition, Right. And that addition, right, the Eastern Orthodox Church very much disagreed with. But if you think about the Nicene Creed without that, right, prior to that addition, it provides the really broad boundaries for what it means to be Christian. It's hard to believe that you could not believe some of what's in the Nicene Creed and still believe in the authority of Scripture. I think in its broadest sense, doctrine can help with that. Where it just gets strange is when we get it.

00:59:09
Speaker 3: Whittled down and whittled down and whittled down and whittled down and whittled down and it's like it has to be this um you know it um i keep going back to the young earth creation stuff because i just i've always found that to be frustrating when i as an old testament guy but it's like if you don't believe in young earth creationism in these specific ways, if you don't interpret these texts in exactly this way, you're denying inerrancy, you're outside the authority of scripture.

00:59:34
Speaker 1: Those have been real conversations. And I think those are the kind of conversations that create this sort of fragmentation within the body of Christ and that are truly problematic.

00:59:48
Speaker 2: Well said. And I think what that, the thing that I feel like we have to keep reemphasizing is there is a purpose in the doctrines. The reality is to recognize it as an attempt from the outside to make sense of what's the actual primary, and that's the work of God and the narrative and the way in which God is drawing us into that narrative as we exist now in that particular space and time. And the goal of doctrine is to try to make sense of it in a time and a place for a people. The trouble with it is that that doctrine ends up being codified in our minds and hearts as something universal right and then it's bequeathed to the next generation or to the larger community to the cloud who has no understanding of that larger dynamic because they have other things to worry about right I think about when I was in college I was in a history class and our professor had us read a modern philosopher who I'll leave unnamed because if I name it then we now have an emotional response that's inevitably going to come up and I was you know I was I think third year of college something like that I have by no means an expert but I'd been I'd been enculturated into that dynamic yeah of this philosopher equals evil and the truth is is that there was nothing in this reading that I had any good reasons to think of as evil but I was already inclined because of the implicit doctrine at play culturally socially that to think that this was evil. And I remember a friend of mine and an acquaintance of mine, we didn't really hang out, but an acquaintance of mine who was in the class came up to me outside of class after reading it and was actually really compelled by that selection we read. And I got so mad at him. And that's where the emotional reaction clicked in. And it stuck with me to this day as an embarrassing episode in my life to learn from, realizing that I got mad at my acquaintance Yeah.

01:01:58
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah.

01:02:28
Speaker 2: That cause the deeper fragmentation within our faith where we're not even inclined to even pay attention to what someone in another aisle in ultimately the same larger cathedral of the faith is sitting, right? Because of the boundary lines of the aisles.

01:02:47
Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. No, very good. Well, I think that covers it sufficiently. I think nailing down that we actually don't disagree with doctrine and that we believe that there's a value and function to it. At the end of the day, I think what both of us are saying to some degree is that the Bible should be the final authority for life and faith. And we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that doctrine never gets in the way of that. And so we've got to be diligent about making sure that the doctrines don't start dividing us in ways that, uh, are inappropriate, that they don't create an animosity and, uh, uh, distrust, uh, across, um, Christian lines, um, that we are all part of one body. And so, um, I think that that gets to the root of what we're concerned with, with fragmentation. So we'll, we'll close it off there and, um, Yeah, appreciate the conversation, man. This is helpful. Hopefully everybody else enjoyed it, and we will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.