Tangents Are Not the Enemy

Darren:            So, is there anything you’d like to ask us?

Miranda:          Ooh, yes, yes: when lightning strikes the sea, why don’t all the fish die?

Darren:            Relevant to the job.

Miranda:          Oh – no.

Miranda S1 E3 ‘Job’ (2009)

This post is sort of a response to an article posted by somebody called Cole Brown on the Gospel Coalition website this Thursday just gone, which I encountered when a link to it popped up on my Facebook newsfeed, captioned by the relevant friend simply thus: ‘This.’ It’s called ‘Why Your Small Group May Need to Stop Talking About the Bible’, and you can find it here, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-small-group-may-need-stop-talking-bible/, if you’d like to go and check it out before you read any further, which would probably be quite a good idea.

 

OK, I don’t think that’s a Bible they’re talking about, but I needed a stock photo. Thanks to nenetus at freedigitalphotos.net.

I’d like to start by making it clear that I don’t hate Cole’s argument or anything.¹ I don’t even really disagree with it: it’s true enough (and, I’ll be honest, personally convicting) that I can often be readier to discuss the Bible in a theoretical kind of way than to let it do its work of prompting me to actually repent and be changed. Indeed, I’m particularly bad for getting distracted chasing up obscure, non-applicatory questions: for instance, I spent a good chunk of my evening the other day trying to make the numbers of Jacob’s descendants recorded in Genesis 46 add up.² (For the record, I think I can see how they work now, but Stephen’s statement in Acts 7:14, consistent with the Septuagint rendering of the chapter but not the Hebrew, still has me scratching my head.) Anyway, my point is, I’m a nerd and I get obsessed over tiny details and I can sit talking and talking about those tiny details, or poring over a short essay’s worth of books and Internet tabs trying to make sense of them, for hours without considering it a hardship – so please take what I’m about to say in the light of that. My upcoming suggestion about how we ought to look at the Bible corporately does, at the end of the day, align awfully nicely with my own personal disposition and preference, and that should probably make us both a bit suspicious of it. Still, I’m not claiming to be providing the whole picture: take what I say alongside what Cole says, not in opposition to it, and weigh both of our propositions, as everything, against the Spirit and the water and the blood.³

The basic thrust of Cole’s article is that, in small-group discussion-based Bible studies, there is a tendency to avoid the central point of the pericope at hand – which, he argues, is usually pretty straightforward, or has at least been pretty straightforwardly explained to the group at some point – and to focus instead on the convoluted ins and outs of tangential issues, which provide lots of fuel for conversation without provoking anyone to really work out what the key thrust of the passage might mean in practical terms for his or her own walk with the Lord. For this reason, he advocates forgoing ‘discussion’ time in favour of ‘response’ time. Stop spending small-group sessions talking about the Bible, he says, and instead just remark on what it’s calling you specifically to change about how you think and behave.

I think the problem he identifies is a real one, and I think the solution he proposes seems an appropriate one for that problem. My hesitation, though, is that I suspect that, if applied, it might exacerbate a different problem I think is present in many small-group discussion-based Bible studies. Cole thinks we talk about theological issues that aren’t specifically contained in the main point of the passage too much; I, on the other hand, tend to feel we talk about them too little.

Granted, Cole is a professional church-planter with far, far more experience of this kind of ministry than I have; and equally, it may just be that our experiences of it have been rather different. Nonetheless, I think the fact that I related to most of what he described makes that a less plausible explanation for our differing perspectives than it might have been. I’ve been in small-group discussion-based Bible studies where we kept veering off talking about questions the passage didn’t address, berating the behaviour of others without scrutinising our own, in exactly the way Cole describes, and I remember being struck even at the time that what allowed space for that was a failure to keep our heads in the passage and answer the discussion questions from it instead of from our own ideas. It was definitely a case of seeming to have interacted with the Bible without having done so meaningfully – precisely the trouble that worries Cole – but the problem wasn’t that we were talking about the Bible; the problem was that we weren’t. Still, I accept that it is, in fact, entirely possible to spend ages chatting about the actual contents of Bible and yet not being in the slightest conformed to the image of Christ; I mean, let’s be real here, I work in a Theology & Religion department. So to illustrate why I think, despite what Cole says, that we’re not chatting about it enough, I’m going to give a couple of examples from the Christian youth camp thingmabob that I helped on for the second time this last summer.

One of the things that was stressed to us in training sessions for said Christian youth camp thingmabob was not to get distracted by secondary issues or abstract theological questions: stress the main point, go heavy on practical application, and for goodness’ sake stick to the time limit. It’s a very similar recipe to that suggested by Cole, and I can definitely see the point of it, but there were a few occasions in the week when it felt very restrictive, even so as to be potentially damaging. In one seminar, for example, we were given some twenty minutes in small groups to look up and talk through a selection of specified passages relating to the new creation. I’d seated myself with a bunch of young people I didn’t know particularly well because they were lacking an adult leader to guide the discussion. We ran into a spot of bother pretty quickly, upon reading the second prescribed passage of Isaiah 65:17-19, 21-23.

What a strange-looking Bible reference – why miss out verse 20? Well, probably because it talks about how nobody will die young in the Jerusalem it’s talking about: one who dies at a hundred will be seen as having been struck down prematurely for his sin.⁴ And, um, that doesn’t fit terribly well as a depiction of the new creation given that we know there’ll be no death there,⁵ now does it? But one of my group was astute enough to pick up that verse 23 doesn’t really make sense in a new-creation scenario either: we’d already established, according to Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees’ challenge,⁶ that the resurrected won’t get married – so how come, she asked, they’re apparently still having kids?

 

Yep, the only marriage in the new creation will be that of the Lamb to his bride: earthly marriage is, at the end of the day, just a giant metaphor for that. What a thought.

It was a really excellent question, and I told her so; and then I said that the way I’d solve that problem would be by saying that these verses weren’t actually talking about the new creation.⁷ But lots of people disagree with me about that, I hastened to add – after all, the people who had designed the seminar were clearly among that group – and it would be too complicated to explain my own view in the precious few minutes we had left (how much did I want to bet that none of these teenagers had even heard of the millennium before? and besides, I wasn’t really there to proselytise them all round to my own views on eschatology). I’d be more than happy to talk about it in more detail over lunch (which was coming up next) or some other time, I finished – but of course these guys were hardly going to take me up on that offer given that they didn’t know me particularly well. And so, essentially, the thing was left undealt with. It wasn’t the only outstanding question from that seminar discussion, either. Granted, all the concerns about how old our glorified bodies would look, and wouldn’t it be weird if you and your parents were like the same age after the resurrection?, were probably missing the point a bit, but nonetheless, they were still valid questions that these young people wanted to talk about. And there were other questions about things like the eternal fate of stillborn children and the significance of the seven bowls of God’s wrath in Revelation 15-17 and the nature of magic as scripture condemns it (no, seriously, they did ask that last one; I didn’t just shoehorn it into the discussion because it’s what I study). Did any of these amount to personal application of the central point of the passage? No, not at all. They wouldn’t meet Cole’s approval as things to talk about in a small-group discussion-based Bible study. But the fact remains that the Bible talks about them, or at the very least contains major implications for them, and these young saints wanted to know about them, and yet I saw no option but to put them aside after the most cursory of treatments, for the sake of staying on point and sticking to time.

A very similar thing happened later in the week, when we were having a dorm study session that followed up a talk on Colossians 2:16-23. The speaker had emphasised that there was no need to have extra spiritual experiences beyond mere belief in the gospel in order to be a real-deal Christian, and had mentioned speaking in tongues as one such extra spiritual experience with which some might attempt to disqualify others from the faith. When the study was basically all wrapped up except for a final ‘all make sense? any questions?’, one of our girls asked, straightforwardly enough, what on earth speaking in tongues was.

There were four leaders in our dorm, and it became apparent within a minute that none of us had ever spoken in tongues in our life, but the girls had a lot of follow-up questions. Are they ‘real’ languages? But couldn’t people just be making it up? Can they control it? It was pretty evident that these young sisters of ours had never had anyone explain this stuff to them, and they were hungry to understand it, but, after a very quick trip to 1 Corinthians 12, we ended up basically just repeating the same line as had been given by the lady who delivered the talk – the key thing is that you don’t need to be able to speak in tongues to be a Christian – and with that, shutting the lid on the study. Was speaking in tongues the central point of the passage? No, not at all; it wasn’t actually even mentioned in it. It was about as tangential as you can get without being simply unrelated, and involved no personal life application for any of us. But the Bible does talk about it, and these girls wanted to understand; isn’t that warrant enough to have the conversation?

What, after all, are we supposed to imply – that all this stuff that the Bible does address, even if it’s never the central point of a particular extract, doesn’t actually matter? How is that going to instil confidence in anyone asking these questions that the Bible is even worth applying to their lives, if we’ll so readily dismiss the finer points of its contents? And if small-group discussion-based Bible studies aren’t the right space for these kinds of theoretical theological conversations, then, pray tell, what on earth is? Are the saints simply to be left with their undiscussed questions and concerns about what they can see in the text gnawing away at their faith in private? How can we see our brothers and sisters in need of talking through particular issues, however theoretical or tangential those issues may be, and refuse them? Perseverance or apostasy can hinge on a misunderstanding of a secondary issue – or on a sense that Christians just stick their heads in the sand about the trickier questions raised by their holy book. And, I reiterate, if these questions can’t be talked about in a small-group discussion-based Bible study, what possible space does the normal running of the church actually provide for them to be talked about in?

Much as I don’t really disagree with Cole, then, I did want to chuck my own, different perspective out there as well. He’s worried about Christians dodging personal application of the central point in favour of tangential theological issues; but I’m worried that if we don’t have a space to deal with tangential theological issues, that threatens to erode our certainty that personal application of the central point is even something worth doing.

Footnotes

¹ Yeah, I’m going to call him by his first name. Obviously I wouldn’t if this were an academic piece, but he’s a brother in Christ; I don’t imagine he’d mind.

² Verses 26 and 27 are a good place to start to see why making sense of the arithmetic here might take a bit of a work: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+46&version=ESVUK.

³ I here allude to 1 John 5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John+5&version=ESVUK.

⁴ No, really; check it out: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+65&version=ESVUK.

⁵ As per Revelation 21, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+21&version=ESVUK.

⁶ As recorded in Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 20. Have the Mark, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+12&version=ESVUK, because whatever.

⁷ I take the ‘but’ at the start of verse 18 to mean that, yes, God’s going to create a new heavens and a new earth, such that the former things will be forgotten, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to fulfil his promises about the restoration of this present Jerusalem first. The Hebrew for ‘but’ there is כִּי אִם (kī ʾim), which tends to have the force of, not what I just said, but rather this other thing; it establishes a contrast. Check it out for yourself: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=strong=H0518b|version=ESV|version=OHB&options=VUGVNH&display=INTERLEAVED&qFilter=H0518b.