smerickson.com the personal website of steven m. erickson

Recently, I’ve been following an interesting conversation started by a post by Alan Hartung at A Different Perspective Last week he wrote a post entitled The Idolatry of Truth . In it he contends that it is possible to, and many evangelicals have, “turned intellectual truth into an idol”. He means by this that sometimes those who seem to want to know the most and study the hardest in order to rightly order the truth, do not exhibit the same amount of effort in living as a follower of Jesus. It seems like a lot of confusion has come up around this post. I think some of the confusion stems from the somewhat misleading title. The post was entitled “The Idolatry of Truth”, but through his clarifications it seems like Alan isn’t really against the concept of truth but against people holding to their version of it too tightly and seeming to care about it more than seeking to live missionally.

While I would acknowledge that there are ways in which certain wordings of truth can become more important than actually understanding them or seeking to live them out, I think that Alan’s post makes these seem more at odds than they really are. Is a focus on living missionally really in opposition to studying theology and seeking to order God’s truth? Are not these things more intimately related than Alan’s post would lead you to believe? The other day, JollyBlogger wrote a post entitled How is the emerging church post-liberal? In it he describes the battles between “conservatives” and “liberals” around the beginning of the twentieth century. One quote from that post seems to fit the controversy surrounding Alan’s post pretty well. He writes:

The core rallying cry of liberalism was that Christianity was a life not a doctrine. [J. Gresham] Machen opposed this, saying that Christianity is a life founded on a doctrine. Doctrine was the foundation of Christianity – we are saved by what we believe, and there are historical realities which must be affirmed when we say what we believe.

I think Machen is exactly right. Why must we pit living the Christian life against doctrine? Are not these things more friends than enemies? More fuel to enflame the other than water to snuff it out?

I have found Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s book The Drama of Doctrine a wonderful work which seeks to move past what he calls this “ugly ditch” I see represented in Alan’s post. Permit me to quote a somewhat lengthy section from the book which I think is relevant to the discussion:

Theology is connected to the life of the church. Doctrines arise not from speculative theories but from core practices – baptism, the Eucharist, prayer, worship – that constitute the ongoing life and identity of the church. The theory/practice distinction, together with the contrast between doctrine and life to which it gives rise, is toxic to Christian faith and to the project of faith seeking understanding. The present work seeks to move theology away from theoretical knowledge in order to reorient it toward wisdom. It is this picture of theology as wisdom that, more than anything else, enables us to traverse the ugly ditch between theory and practice. . . . Theology involves both theory (knowledge) and practice (life) for the sake of its pastoral function: assisting people to enjoy and glorify God. Perhaps the best way to overcome the theory/practice dichotomy is to let the subject matter of Christian theology determine theology’s task. Jesus Christ is the word and wisdom of God, the revealer and the redeemer: the way, the truth, and the life. Several points follow for theology from this astounding identification. First, theology must be concerned with what each of these terms represents; it must deal with truth, with ways of living, and with the meaning of life. Second, it must keep all three in mind at once. Focusing on truth to the exclusion of way and life leads to a preoccupation with theory; conversely, a preoccupation with way and life can lead to pragmatism. Christian doctrine, similarly, should serve the purpose of fostering truthful ways of living.

I could go on, but I think the above section is well suited to address both those in the emerging church who come across as trying to pit doctrine against life, as well as those who, often too quickly and sometimes rudely, dismiss some of the more positive points the movement makes while rightly rejecting that which is false. The Christian life is a hard one to live and we all need to be challenged in different areas at different times, let us try to do that Biblically and in love.

Head on over to the smerickson.com chatroom. There you can see if I’m around or chat with others visiting the site. It should be a fun place. Enjoy.

The chatroom

In our sunday school class this semester we are focusing on Genesis 1 - 3. This past week we focused on two issues, the meaning of the word "day" and the meaning of Sabbath. This class has been on my mind the past few days, so I wanted to offer a couple of random comments on both of these topics. I'll post part 1 tonight and part 2 soon.

It seems that whenever the book of Genesis is studied the question of what the word "day" means comes up. To be honest I think that this is completely misguided and very unhelpful. First, as I read the text, there doesn't appear to be any internal indicators given in the text by Moses that let us know what he means by the word "day". Realizing this, people then go off to other places of the Bible to try and "prove" that day means 24 hrs or day means a long period of time. This to me seems pretty fruitless because you're going to easily be able to make a case for both of those definitions. Finally, I just don't think that the point of the text is to emphasize that God created the world in 7 days; regardless of how you understand the word day. The point of the text is that God created, not that he did it in a certain time period.

While we were discussing this, one of the clearest examples of what happens when one asks the wrong questions of a text was given. One well intentioned student tried to prove the point that "day" in Genesis 1-2 means a 24 day by going to Jesus' first miracle. Jesus' first miracle is when he turns water into wine and not just any wine but the best wine, which also happens to be the oldest. This student's point was that in this story we see that Jesus performed a miracle of time. He accomplished in a very short period of time what usually takes a very long period of time. Just as Jesus performed a miracle of time with the wine, so too did God work a miracle of time by creating the world in seven 24 hour days. While this is very creative, it is just completely misguided; it misunderstands the points of both stories. Just as the point of the creation narrative is not the length of days, the point of the miracle at the wedding of Cana is not that Jesus can do things in a short period of time which usually take a long period of time. I don't mean any disrespect to this student, it was just too clear an example of what happens when you ask the wrong questions of a text.