A culture of education
About 100 years ago, the man who started our denomination was involved in full-time Bible study in the Portland Public Library. He studied on his own, but ironically, he was not alone. There were other people studying the Bible in the Portland Public Library at the same time, and those other people were part of the beginning of what is now known as Western Seminary. Our founder chose to study on his own rather than to participate in a normal Christian education, and the consequences of that have affected many thousands of people.
He chose to study odd theories, to focus on the fringes of Christianity. There he found ideas that he could use to arouse interest on his radio program. As he aired these ideas, he found people who would accept these fringe ideas, people who did not trust the majority Christian culture. He wanted to have a message that no one else was preaching, and a number of other people liked to have “knowledge” that other people didn’t have. For the most part, they did not know that he had taken a few wrong turns to get to where he was.
Some of the people who studied further eventually left the denomination, or were kicked out for asking questions contrary to the party line. It was a culture of anti-education. Even though we started our own school to teach our own doctrines, the culture of the denomination continued to be distrustful of ordinary education. For the most part, we studied only our own doctrines.
It was 30 some years ago that we as a denomination had to admit that we had gone down the wrong track. By the grace of God, we corrected most of the errors our founder had made. We accepted the historically orthodox belief in the Trinity, and salvation by grace, and we rejected the Old Testament laws that were so fundamental to our denomination.
However, we needed a change of culture, not just a change in doctrines. In some ways, the erroneous doctrines were just symptoms of a deeper problem: that is, resistance to education. And that was a result of our desire to be independent, to go our own way, to be different and distinctive.
GCI needs a culture of education, of seeking to learn more. Every church needs this. We need to value education, where leaders are not only willing to be educated, but they are also eager for more of it. We have taken steps in the right direction, but I think that we have not gone far enough. It is my hope that you graduates will continue in the direction of more education.
Part of my hopes for GCI is that we have a culture of education, that leaders and members want to study the words of God, that they want to know as much as they can about how good and great he is. And it is my hope that congregations will want this, too, and want their pastors to further their education. When Peter wrote that we need to grow in grace and knowledge, he was writing to people who were already believers. Every believer should want to grow in grace and knowledge, for as long as we live.
We have made progress in the right direction, but I think we need more. I still see some people who ask, What is the minimum education? What is the least that we have to do? And is there any way we can reduce that, to make it easier?
I still see some people who focus on the fringes of Christianity, whose desire for difference sometimes seems greater than desire for what’s right. Oh, of course they call the fringes “truth,” but in some cases they already have their minds made up and don’t want to study it in any greater depth. They read only the people who are on the fringes. They pounce on unusual ideas with unusual fervor. They take one part of the gospel… and shy away from others.
I will share a personal illustration of how it sometimes works. Many years ago, before our doctrinal changes, I did a little theological research of my own. I started with a conclusion and went to the library to scour various encyclopedias and commentaries for quotes that would support my conclusion. Never mind that those authors would not agree with my conclusion, but I could find sentences here and there that I could use.
This was a bad way to do research – it is basically a dishonest way to do research. And yet I can still see people in GCI doing almost the same thing. They latch onto one characteristic of Jesus and want to force everything to fit into the mold of what they think that is. To use a specific example, they say that Jesus is love, and to that I can readily agree, and rejoice! But the problem arises when they think that Jesus must conform to their own ideas about what love is, rather than letting Jesus show us and tell us what his love actually means.
So they read the Gospels with their colored glasses, and they tend to skip over passages that don’t fit into their ideas of what the gospel is. What they say, in effect, is, “If it doesn’t sound good to me, then it can’t be the good news of Jesus Christ… because I am the standard by which the gospel is to be evaluated. I know what is good, and Jesus would never say anything that I don’t like; he would never be correcting me on my ideas of what is good.”
No matter who reads the Gospels, they are going to find a few passages that are “difficult.” Maybe it’s about the resurrection to condemnation, maybe it’s about limiting our sexual desires, or forgiving people who don’t even repent. You will find some verses that seem to support predestination, and some that do not. Some verses will proclaim mercy, but others sound vindictive. Some verses promise automatic answers to prayer; others talk about money in ways that make us uncomfortable.
When people notice a passage that doesn’t fit very well into their paradigm, they search for some other explanation. “It can’t mean this,” they say, and sometimes they never get around to explaining what it is actually trying to communicate. Sometimes they are, as Peter writes, twisting the scriptures to their own destruction. They do it with Paul’s letters, and they do it with the teachings of Jesus. So their idea of research is to find someone who says something that fits into the conclusion that they already have.
Now, I will admit that this is sometimes the right thing to do. When the passage seems to say something that runs contrary to what other passages say, then it is right for us to study what other people may have said about it, and why. But if we are looking only for folks who agree with us, that should be a flashing yellow light: caution! If we read material only from our own tribe, only from authors we already like, then perhaps we are limiting ourselves to never learning anything new.
Sometimes people use substandard research to support a good conclusion, but other times they are using it to support a bad conclusion. They have their minds made up, and they skip over evidence that doesn’t support it. But maybe there is something in the text that we need to learn from, rather than explain it away.
Maybe we need to consider the possibility that God is more multi-dimensional than the one- or two-color caricature we have created.
Our booklet The God Revealed in Jesus Christ: An Introduction to Trinitarian Theology is good so far as it goes, but it just didn’t go very far. It is, as the title says, only an introduction. It was designed to break people out of old ways of thinking, but a short booklet simply cannot present the full picture. Even a series of theology courses cannot present all there is to know and love about God. Many people might like a one-dimensional God, a monochromatic God where we think we have everything figured out, but God is more than one dimension, more than one color, and more than we can figure out.
If we read the Gospels, we will see that Jesus is a complex character. Not everyone thought that he was preaching good news. Even his own disciples didn’t like some of the things that he taught. Love is more complicated than we might want it to be, and righteousness is definitely more complicated than we want it to be. Jesus revealed the Father to us, but he cannot reveal everything to us for the simple reason that even at our best, we are not able to understand everything there is to know about God, or his plan or his dealings with humanity. We are limited in what we can understand.
So, I hope that you graduates don’t think that you are done. You have a good start, but I hope that you want to continue studying. Although graduation marks the completion of one project for you, it means that you will now have time to begin another, and I would like to encourage you that at least one of your new projects will be a commitment to more educational efforts.
Our Master of Pastoral Studies degree, and our Master of Theological Studies degree, requires 14 courses. In those courses, we have focused on our own doctrines. We have not had time to explore in any depth what Lutherans, Calvinists, Pentecostals and Greek Orthodox churches teach, and why. We have not had time to see how great Christian thinkers through the ages have dealt with these doctrines. We have heard of Irenaeus and Athanasius, Augustine and Aquinas, Bonhoeffer and Barth, but few of our graduates really know much about them. We are getting our theology second-hand, third-hand, and filtered. That’s all we can do in 14 courses.
We have similar limitations when it comes to the Bible. Here again we are getting our ideas at least one step removed from what the Bible originally said. Some of us don’t do the hard work of thinking it through for ourselves. We skip to our favorite paraphrase, which is actually a commentary in disguise, or we go to a writer we like, looking for support for the ideas that we already have, or in some cases simply looking for ideas because we have none of our own.
And when it comes to practical ministry, well, we want it all to be practical. We don’t examine it to see if it is theologically correct, or whether the occasional Bible references really support the point, all we care is whether it works. So let me give you a tip on that: If you want to attract lots of people, be a cult. People like the idea that there are secret doctrines, teachings that most other churches don’t want you to know, teachings that others are neglecting. When we judge ministry activities by whether they are practical, we are using the wrong measuring stick. What we really need to ask is, Does this get us closer to Jesus? Are we becoming more like Jesus?
And to answer that question, we need to learn more about what Jesus is like – not just in one dimension, the dimension that we happen to like, but in all the dimensions that the Bible gives us. One Bible course will not enough. Even 14 courses cannot give you all that Jesus really is. We all need more, and even though you are graduates of this seminary, you need more, too.
It does not have to be formal, accredited education, although we would be happy for it to be so, but we do want you to continue at least on your own. We want a culture in which people study out of desire, and not just duty. It may start with duty, but I hope, for the sake of the future of this denomination, that it moves to desire, that education becomes part of our culture because we desire to learn more about the God we love, and to recognize that he is bigger and more complex and more wonderful than we currently know.
He does not fit into our molds, but rather he wants us to fit into his mold, and since no one is perfect in understanding right now, we need lifelong learning. We try to understand as best we can, and to teach as best we can, but one of the first steps in understanding is to admit that we don’t know everything. We are not perfect now, and in this life we will never be perfect in understanding, so we need lifelong learning. We need a culture of continuing education.
- So, as graduates of a faith-based seminary, as people who believe that Jesus reveals what God is really like, what should we do?
- First, we need to know what Jesus actually taught. If we love him, we will want to know what he has said.
- Second, we should not avoid the sayings that we don’t like. Actually, we need to pay extra attention to the words we don’t like, because that’s probably where we need to grow the most.
- Third, we need to know what the words mean. We need to look at dictionaries and lexicons – and not just the ones that are on the internet that are more than a hundred years old. We need to see how the words are used in other verses and in other literature of the time period. It takes work, and not just assertions that “it can’t mean that, because I don’t want it to mean that.”
- Most words have more than one possible meaning, and that can sometimes give us an “escape.” But we have to see which of the possible meanings makes the most sense in the context – in the cultural context, the verses around it, in the entire book, and in the entire New Testament.
- We also need to bring theology to the table, to see what theology says about the topic. But we also have to see what the Scriptures say about our theology. Perhaps we have misunderstood one or the other. Perhaps we need more study both in Scripture and in theology, and we need to be aware that our own context, our own personal histories, can shape what we think “makes sense.”
- The last thing I’ll mention here is that we want to avoid twisting the Scriptures. This happens when people do not let the Scriptures say anything but what they already believe. This happens when people choose a flimsy argument rather than a good one simply because they like the conclusion of the flimsy argument and don’t investigate it any further. Perhaps it actually is the right conclusion, but it’s wrong for us to choose it merely because it is the one we like.
Paul warned Timothy about that kind of thing when he wrote, “The time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires” (2 Timothy 4:3-4). They look for teachers who already agree with what they want the Scriptures to mean. Instead of that, our goal should be that we rightly explain what the Scriptures mean, rather than trying to explain them away, to squirm out of what we hope they don’t mean.
Graduates and friends, what I’m saying here is that you are not done. Graduation is not a start, nor a finish. It is a milestone along the road. There is more work to do, for me as well as for you. We have given you a guided start, but we need to continue to study, to learn, and to wrestle with what the verses actually mean, and how it all fits together.
Read the New Testament and see if there’s anything there that makes you uncomfortable, anything that you wish Jesus hadn’t said. There probably is. One thing I don’t like is the fact that Jesus often criticizes the scribes – that’s people like me who spend their lives studying the Bible. These were people doing the right thing, but Jesus says they were doing it in the wrong way. Their traditions had boxed them into one particular way of reading the Scriptures, and they were not willing to let the Scriptures say anything new to them. That’s a danger I want to avoid.
If you want to grow in grace and knowledge, then you need to study. As graduates, you have a good start. So I will conclude with the trite but true: Keep up the good work!
Now, to him who began a good work in you, may he continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns, so that he may be praised in all that we say and do. Amen.
Michael Morrison, PhD
President