One Foot in the World 3: Simple Things

“Has to be done in a certain way, or it doesn’t count. There’s a special knife, special robes, and a special hat. It’s surprisingly specific. It’s going to take me ages to get them all together.”

Being Human S4 E1, ‘Eve of the War’ (2012)

So you know Naaman the Syrian?

 

Here he is, trying to give Elisha a thank-you present. My own thanks are due to Bible Vector for this nice out-of-copyright picture.

If you’ve been a Christian for some time and you’re shaking your head, well, this just goes to prove my point that we need to be teaching the Bible to one another in greater depth, but leaving that aside, here’s the story.¹ Naaman was one of the king of Syria’s top military guys, but he also had a skin disease of the sort you really definitely didn’t want in the Ancient Near East. His Israelite slave girl suggested that her compatriot the prophet Elisha would be able to cure this condition and Naaman thought that possibility was worth a shot. So he got together an insane amount of cash and pootled off to Israel.

The getting togther of said insane amount of cash was the first indication that, when Naaman undertook that act of faith of going to see the prophet, he brought with him not only gold and silver and outfits and horses and chariots, but also a vast collection of misguided preconceptions as to how this process ought to go. He was clearly expecting to pay a high fee for his miracle, whereas Elisha quite rightly wouldn’t accept anything in return for being the channel through which God manifested some element of his almighty power. On top of that, instead of going straight to Elisha, Naaman initially went to the king of Israel – Jehoram son of Ahab at this point – who consequently assumed that, in sending one of his esteemed generals with a request that Jehoram couldn’t possibly fulfil, the king of Syria was trying to engineer a pretext for war. Presumably what Naaman was thinking was that if Elisha had the power to cure illnesses, he must have been a top-of-the-heap kind of guy, in with the in-crowd and in favour with the king – whereas in actual fact, at the last meeting between Elisha and Jehoram that we have recorded, the former reprimanded the latter for persisting in his parents’ idolatrous ways, and would have refused to even speak to him if Jehoshaphat king of Judah, whom Elisha respected, hadn’t also been there.² Still, Elisha now sent word to Jehoram to send Naaman to him. So Naaman went, and arrived in full pomp and circumstance, and was met by a messenger who told him to wash seven times in the Jordan.

Well, that didn’t fit with how Naaman had thought this was going to go either. Wasn’t this holy man supposed to at least come out of his house and stand there and call on the name of his God and wave his hand over the afflicted area, and thus cure him? That was how these kinds of healings were supposed to work, wasn’t it? And, all right, if he had to wash in a river, if that was part of the treatment, fine, but he knew of much nicer rivers back in Syria that would surely be far more effective than this muddy little trickle of a thing they called the Jordan.

Naaman had stepped out so far in faith: he’d taken the word of a slave-girl that the prophet of the LORD could work wonders, and he’d gone all the way to Israel off the back of that. But his ideas about how the wondrous works of the LORD ought to be achieved were pure worldliness. He was expecting them to be achieved through wealth and in a context of high societal status; he preferred a flash-looking ritual process, or at least something that would take place in the surroundings he was accustomed to and liked, to the simple thing the LORD commanded him to do. He thought he knew what obtaining favour and blessing from the LORD was supposed to look like, but he was basing those presuppositions on his own purely worldly experiences; so when the real word of the LORD came along, looking very different to how he expected, he didn’t believe that obeying it would achieve the ends he desired.

The story has a happy ending, of course, but only because Naaman agreed to let go of his worldly preconceptions, or at least suspend them for long enough to obey what the LORD had said. God hadn’t asked him to do anything particularly difficult or demanding; in a way, that was the problem. It was all just too low-key for Naaman. Surely no extraordinary supernatural effect could be accomplished by so little a thing; surely resources and prestige and impressive rituals (perhaps with special robes and a special hat) were required? Or, if he were to accept God’s instruction, surely it would work better with some adjustments to bring it onto more familiar territory?

No. No, it wouldn’t. Theoretically, we all know that: when God says to do something, you do it, no more and no less. The totality of his power is demonstrated all the more when it operates outside the structures and commodities the world thinks is important. You’re all with me so far, right?

So now, with that in mind, can I take you to the end of Acts 2?

And they were devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. And there came to every soul fear, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all those who believed were together and they had everything in common, and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing them to all, as any had need; and day by day remaining in attendance, united, in the temple, and breaking bread at home, they received food in delight and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favour before the whole people. And the Lord added those being saved day by day to their number.³

 

What a lot of bread to be broken. Mmm, bread.

Wonders and signs; people coming to salvation every day. Sounds pretty amazing, right? Sounds like a seriously desirable end? So what was it that was causing this jazz to happen? Well, I can see four things in that first sentence: teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayer. Four simple things that the believers devoted themselves to, that they persisted in – all of them day by day, not some of them once or twice a week and on special occasions – and look what happened. The rest of the paragraph, I think, is explaining rather than expanding that list: devotion to fellowship leads to holding everything in common (these are cognate terms in the Greek); and thereby everyone’s needs are supplied, leading to thanksgiving and praise as part of devotion to prayer; you get the gist, I won’t work through every detail (consider that homework if you like). Day by day, the church should meet for teaching and fellowship and breaking of bread and prayer. Four things. That’s it.

But surely no extraordinary supernatural effect could be accomplished by such simple little things? Surely we need more than that if we’re to achieve the ends we desire, the spread of the gospel and the glorification of God? Surely we need resources (like buildings and salaried ministers), and prestige (through, say, advertising and slick apologetics and enough of a respected place in society to influence policy-making), and impressive rituals (whether in our mind that looks like high mass with robes and incense, or concert-style musical worship with strobe lights and smoke machines, or even just a really well-put-together kids’ holiday club)? Or surely God’s instructions would work better with some adjustments to bring them onto more familiar territory: ‘everything in common’ sounds a bit uncomfortably commune-ish, for instance, so maybe we could tone that down and just ask everybody to pay tithes of their income into a church fund that pays for those buildings and salaried ministers we decided we needed? Now the thing looks almost like a social club with an unspecified membership fee. Familiar territory indeed.

On one level, yes, God has asked something difficult and demanding of us, in that we’re to take up our cross and crucify our flesh on it on a daily basis. But on another level, our Lord’s yoke is easy and his burden light.⁴ As the Church, we’re to devote ourselves, day by day, to teaching and fellowship and breaking of bread and prayer. That’s it. And I really do believe that if we do that, without veering off after our worldly preconceptions about how this process ought to go, how we expect our desired ends to be achieved, we’ll open up the way for extraordinary things to happen. The totality of God’s power is demonstrated all the more when it operates outside the structures and commodities the world thinks is important. He is ready and willing to bless our obedience; he blessed Naaman’s, irritated and reluctant as it was, and unlike Naaman, we, why, we are already our Father’s children with his favour and blessing irrevocably bestowed on us in Christ. Naaman was an outsider to God’s people – and in a way, that gave him an excuse for his worldly attitudes. We who have the truth of the gospel and the full body of the scriptures and the Holy Spirit living in us have no such excuse.

In this little series, I’ve been arguing that the church – as far as my experience of it has extended – has one foot in the world. I’ve been arguing that we’re stunting our own growth by failing to make space for all members of the body to exercise their higher giftings.⁵ Perhaps you’ve received the impression that I’m urging us to do more and work harder, piling up more demands and commitments on top of what we’re already doing; that’s really not what I’m going for. In some ways, I think, we need to do a lot less. Naaman didn’t need to bring shedloads of cash or visit the king or undergo a fancy ritual or bathe in his own preferred rivers; he just had to do a simple thing God asked of him. And we too, adelphoi, we just need to do the simple things God asks of us.

Teaching. Fellowship. Breaking of bread. Prayer. That is what the operation of the church should look like, day by day. Everything of the world that we’ve attached to that can be unceremoniously stripped away.

Are you still with me? And even if you’re not, would you pull a Naaman and give it a reluctant try? I anticipate that the results could be truly extraordinary.

Footnotes

¹ You can check it out for yourself in 2 Kings 5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+5&version=ESVUK.

² That story took place a couple of chapters before: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+3&version=ESVUK.

³ My own translation, but with no substantial differences from the ESV: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+2&version=ESVUK. Quick note for interest: my phrases ‘devoting themselves’ and ‘remaining in attendance’ are actually rendering the same Greek word.

⁴ For those ones, you’re looking at Matthew 16:24/Mark 8:34/Luke 9:23, and Matthew 11:30.

⁵ If you’re wondering where the exercise of higher giftings fits into the four things laid out in Acts 2, I’d say it’s covered by ‘the apostles’ teaching’: both of those things refer to the preaching of the word.

One Foot in the World 2: The Evangelical Ceiling

“I can feel you reaching,

Pushing through the ceiling.

’Til the final healing,

I’m looking for you …

I am restless, looking for you.”

Switchfoot, ‘Restless’, Vice Verses (2011)

 

A church ceiling. I have no idea whether the theological stances of the church in question may plausibly be described as evangelical, though.

If you would be so kind as to indulge me, O Willing and Generous Reader, I’d like to spend a substantial proportion of this post testing out a bit of a theory I have going about the nature of teaching in evangelical churches. Specifically, I’m thinking of churches known and celebrated for having ‘good teaching’ – in other words, the apparent best thing on the market with regard to that particular concern (leaving aside other issues like music and service style and community feel and so forth) – but I’d be happy to bring in perspectives from other kinds of congregations as well. Might I ask whether you recognise any of the sentiments and arguments I have attempted to delineate below?

-     Assertion that parables are not allegories, and so not everything in them has to stand for something;

-     Focus on language and imagery and ‘the picture the Bible is painting here’, namely its emotive connotations, rather than what the words actually say and mean to be true;

-     Glossing over of verses that sit at odds with the proposed interpretation, or sometimes downright removal of them from the cited passage;

-     Assumptions that some phrase in the text obviously doesn’t literally mean what it says, because that would just be unrealistic;

-     Acknowledgements of – almost apologies for – how terribly strange and difficult a particular passage is to our modern western ears, that take up nearly as great a proportion of the sermon as the actual exegetical content;

-     Drawing of distance between us now and the early church, such that the passage is understood to mean something very different for us than it did for them;

-     Recognition that Christians have different views about how the passage is to be interpreted, followed by the suggestion that it doesn’t really matter to which of those possible interpretations one subscribes;

-     Use of the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture to argue that correct interpretation of some aspect of its contents isn’t that big of a deal (because if we needed to know, the Bible would tell us nice and unambiguously);

-     A lack of space made in the normal running of the church for discussing what we might call hardcore theology – an assumption that if you want to wrestle through a slightly complex theological issue, you’d better speak to the pastor/vicar/minister/whatever else your church calls that guy;

-     Or finally, my special favourite – dodging of difficult or controversial questions about specific details of the passage at hand by insisting that the really important thing to get out it is some extraordinarily basic doctrine like ‘God keeps his promises’ or ‘God is in charge’.

I’m sure there are more to be thought of, but at any rate, if a substantial number of these characteristics are familiar to you from contexts in which you regularly receive Christian teaching, then might I suggest to you that you may be living under something I like to call the Evangelical Ceiling?

The Evangelical Ceiling is the point beyond which teaching in evangelical churches does not venture; so far but no further. I said above that I was thinking specifically of churches well known for their ‘good teaching’, and I hasten to make clear that I’m not meaning to denigrate their reputation as undeserved. To talk of so far but no further is not to belittle the importance of the ‘so far’. Indeed, when I rocked up at university as a theologically imbecilic little fresher, three years of Sunday sermons and midweek student Bible studies at a church like that were exactly the crash-course in scriptural literacy I needed. It was in that context that I learned to value the scriptures, and I owe more than I can say to the brothers and sisters who made that happen. The ironic thing is that it was then that same high regard for scripture that left me dissatisfied with the approach of the context in which I had been taught it. For those three years, I grew. I really grew. But I think three years of regular teaching is probably about as long as it takes to grow up as far as the Evangelical Ceiling.

You bump up against the Evangelical Ceiling every time you hear a sermon and realise that, aside from perhaps a couple of minor asides, there was nothing in it that you didn’t already know. You confront it every time you wonder why the preacher is taking so long to make a really obvious point, or why he’s bothering to provide so much contextual information when said contextual information amounts to nothing more than basic Bible knowledge. You’re knocking against it every time someone explains the key thrust of a particular passage to you and you think, yes, but God could have conveyed that message in any of a thousand million ways; will nobody help me see why he chose this one? You’re aware of it every time you feel as if you’re covering the same ground over and over again, and yet you’re so certain there’s so much more to understand. You hit the Evangelical Ceiling, my friend, every time you’re desperately craving something solid to eat and they just keep giving you milk.

 

Milk. Obviously the passage is talking about human breastmilk, but I'm not exactly falling over myself to provide an image along those lines.

I mean, milk’s great and all, if you’re the theological equivalent of a babe in arms, and it’s right and good and praiseworthy that the Church should be providing it for those who need it – but unless something is going very wrong with a new convert’s walk with God, she shouldn’t stay in the stage of needing milk for particularly long. Nor is it just some minor shame or mildly unfortunate issue if she does: it is nothing less than a question of her very salvation. Seriously, check out this chunk of the letter to the Hebrews:

About which, the message to say to you (is) much, and hard to explain, since you have become sluggish in your hearing; for, though you ought to be teachers by this time, you have a need of someone teaching you the elements of the beginning of the oracles of God again, and you have become in need of milk, not solid food. For everyone partaking of milk is unfamiliar with the word of righteousness, because he is an infant: solid food belongs to the mature, to those who, through habit, have faculties trained for the distinction of good and bad. Therefore, having left the beginning of the word of Christ behind, let us move towards maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and faith in God, teaching of baptisms and laying on of hands, of resurrection from the dead and judgement of the age. And this we shall do, if indeed God permits. For (it is) impossible, (regarding) those once having been enlightened, and having tasted the heavenly gift, and having become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and having tasted the beautiful word of God and the powers of the coming age, and having fallen away, to renew (them) again to repentance – re-crucifying for themselves the Son of God, and making a spectacle (of him). For earth which has drunk the rain often coming on it, and bears a crop fit for those on whose account it is even farmed, has a share in blessing from God; but (land) bringing forth thistles and thorns (is) unsatisfactory and nearly a curse, the end of which (is) for burning.

People get very het up about that bit about it being impossible to call the formerly enlightened to repentance, but I think the point is really something like this: if you’ve already repented, and seen the truth of the gospel, and received the Holy Spirit, and so forth, then you can’t go back to the beginning and cover the same ground again. To do so is to re-crucify Christ and to defame him. The author of the letter (and I have to say, I’m getting some serious Paul vibes with the milk-versus-solid-food metaphor) is really quite miffed with his addressees for their failure to have moved on from the elements of the beginning of the oracles (or ‘sayings’) of God. Notice how he defines these beginnings: repentance from dead works, faith in God, baptism, laying on of hands (presumably as indicating the receipt of spiritual gifts and commissioning for ministry, so that’s setting the bar for the basics pretty high compared to much of the modern church), resurrection from the dead, judgement of the world. These are the fundamentals of doctrine and practice which we are to grasp and then build on. Understand that it is on them that we’re to build – any apparent growth isn’t really growth if it’s on a foundation other than Christ, as per 1 Corinthians 3, or severed from Christ the true vine, as per John 15 – but we are not to lay them over and over again. It is impossible for someone who’s already well into the milk stage to go back and start from square one with repentance and faith, because the posture of repentance and faith, by its very nature, demands growth. Refusal to grow is a sign of not having really repented and believed in the first place. The ground, furthermore, is cultivated for the sake of others – and here we hit the point I was making last post: if the body builds itself up, then we all need to be striving to grow in order to help others grow too. Elsewhere in scripture – I think of Isaiah 55:10-11 – God characterises his words as rain, which doesn’t fall without achieving his purposes. I think we can take the image in the same sense here, given that it’s the exercise of higher giftings, namely giftings that involve preaching God’s word in one way or another, that is supposed to cause us to grow (for more on this metaphor, take a look also at Deuteronomy 32, zooming in on verse 2). But if we won’t grow, if we’ll stay in the milk stage, if we won’t reach the point of being able to teach others, then we’re unproductive ground. And unproductive ground does not get a happy ending.

Do you see how serious a problem this is? Adelphoi, for your own sake I beg of you, if the normal activity of your church does not cause the word to be preached to you in a way that builds on the foundations you already have, instead of re-laying them, then you need to find other contexts in which it is. By that I don’t mean that you need to up sticks and go church shopping; I mean that you need to meet with other believers who will help you to grow past where you already are – past the Evangelical Ceiling, or any other ceiling that circumstance has imposed upon your faith – in whatever fashion proves feasible.

Maybe you thought my list of symptoms of the Evangelical Ceiling above was little more than a catalogue of pet peeves. Aside from the fact that, if that were the criterion, the list would be far, far longer, I really do think they’re more than that. What I think they have in common is that they’re ways in which we’re holding ourselves back from a proper solid-food diet and keeping ourselves as children in the faith; they’re habits of engagement with scripture whereby we prevent it from achieving the full extent of its work in causing us to better know and serve our God. These things do more than merely irritate me; they make me afraid for us. When we tell mature fellow-believers that the finer details of the passage at hand don’t much matter, because the really important thing to get out of it is such-and-such an incredibly basic doctrine, are we not re-laying a foundation of the beginning of the word of Christ, in precisely the way Hebrews tells us not to?

Still, the very next bit of that Hebrews passage reads, But we are convinced, about you guys, (of) things better and holding salvation, even if we speak like this. And I am convinced, about us, of things better and holding salvation, even if I speak like this. Drink the rain of others’ ministry in the word, bear a crop of your own ministry, and be assured that you shall have your blessing from God.