SPIRITUAL SILOS

Whether we have been Christians for only a few years or a lifetime, it is amazing how myopic we may be if we have only attended churches in one particular denomination. Here are just three example of how traditions can become so ingrained that it is a real surprise to us when we are first exposed to a new perspective:

Definition of grace – Back in high school I got into a theological discussion with my best friend, who was a Roman Catholic. He started ranting and raving about what a horrible person Martin Luther was. My comment was that at least he emphasized the important and neglected doctrine of grace. My friend couldn't understand what I was talking about. He said that the Catholic church teaches grace and they even provide a number of ways for you to earn it. Of course, that wasn't at all my definition, or the accepted definition, of grace.

Mode of “baptism” – One of my pastors told the story of the time when he led a church in Australia. He attended an ecumenical luncheon and was seated next to an Anglican bishop. The bishop turned to him and said, “I see by your name tag that you belong to the Disciples of Christ. I have always wanted to ask someone from your denomination where you got your quaint custom of dunking people in water to baptize them.” Our pastor asked him if he had ever been taught Greek in seminary. The bishop got into a huff and said, “Of course so.” “Then what is the meaning of baptizmo?” The bishop said, “immerse” and then got very quiet. He had never even considered the original meaning of the word before that time.

Eschatology – I'll tell the third story on myself. For about the first 30 years of my life I attended the same denomination, and their view of the future, I found out later, was called amillennialism. At the time, I assumed that it was the only accepted view. Then I started attending an American Baptist church. In one of the Sunday school classes, the members started speculating about what life during the millennium would be like, wondering if all the animals would become vegetarian and whether we would age any. I realized later that their belief fit in the mold of another accepted view of the future called historical premillennialism, but at the time I thought that I had inadvertently wandered into some sort of weird cult. Then I moved to Texas and attended a church where I occasionally taught Sunday school. I was covering the various views of the future and when I got to explaining and defending amillennialism, one visitor to the class started fuming. He blurted out, “How can you possibly call yourself a Christian with that sort of belief?” It turned out that he had only been exposed to a third view of the future, dispensationalism, and couldn't see how any other perspective could possibly be true.

Well, how do you cope with the fact that different denominations and teachers have differing views of Scripture? How do you sort out what is true and what is false? Here are two opposite tacks I have seen taken, both of which themselves can lead to Scripture twisting.

There are some churches which have such a distrust of any sort of spiritual authority or creed that they practice a completely democratic approach to studying the Bible. There was a church in upstate NY that I visited once that took this to an extreme. The Sunday school teacher (and I wouldn't really call him a teacher at all) would read a verse and then go around the room asking each person in turn, “What do you think this means?” and then he would summarize the results by saying, “We have two votes for this interpretation while three people think it means such and such, etc.” And then we would proceed to the next verse. Now there is nothing wrong with getting a good discussion going in class. But without some sort of direction from a leader who has spent at least a litter time in preparation, it soon becomes an exercise in sharing our collective ignorance.

But the opposite approach is no better and that is to follow blindly the teachings of an authority, such as a best selling author, a popular TV preacher, etc. The Left Behind series had a total sales of 63 million copies at the last count. I realize that these are fiction books, but they are based on one particular view of the Bible's teachings on future events and have had a huge popular influence in getting people to accept that branch of theology because of the many people who have read them and seen the movies based on them. 

I once witnessed an even more blatant example years ago when I was in a Bible book store. A customer was haranguing the owner with then concept that one must speak in tongues to be a Christian. The owner politely told her, "That isn't really taught in the Bible." The customer's retort was, "Well, I don't know much about the Bible, but you should really read what this author has to say on the subject."

Or consider a more subtle case: When I first moved to Texas, my next door neighbor came by to introduce himself and invite me to visit his church. He said that I just had to attend it because it was the largest church in town, with three services, and they even televised their church services. The idea he was conveying was: that many people can't possibly be wrong. You have merely to consider the theology taught in many mega-churches to easily dispel that notion the truth is established by popularity.