J.D. Greear @ Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church’s Liberate Conference, February 2015:
Can’t add anything to that. From God’s heart to ours.
Charismatic
On Fish, Time Travel, and the Longing for Something More
Standard“I am encouraged when I see a dozen villagers drawn to Walden Pond to spend a day in fishing through the ice, and suspect that I have more fellows than I knew, but I am disappointed and surprised to find that they lay so much stress on the fish which they catch or fail to catch, and on nothing else, as if there were nothing else to be caught.”
–Thoreau
I read that unfamiliar quote from Henry David Thoreau while searching for a different pithy saying, and I have not been able to shake it.
The fish alone. Nothing else to be caught.
In pondering the meaning behind what the poet/abolitionist/philosopher/naturalist wrote, it got me thinking in several seemingly disconnected directions. But that’s how I am, so bear with me.
Which is why I’m switching writing about fish ponds to time travel.
Caspar David Friedrich – “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”
Thoreau’s 19th century statement about men and fish and a 21st century poll that had people desiring to go back in time, though seemingly unlinked, share an underlying desperation.
What so troubled Thoreau was that the act of fishing on a frozen body of water went beyond just catching the fish. The transcendent qualities of the experiencethe camaraderie shared by the fishermen, the rapture of nature, the participation in the blessings of the Creator, the innumerable numinous aspects of the “mere” act of fishing–were lost on the men who huddled around a dark blue hole in the white canvas that was Walden Pond.
The fish alone. And nothing more.
What are the great questions that form the backbone of all human inquiry? Who? What? Where? When? How?
And why?
When more than 80% of respondents in a poll about desired technology want a time machine to go back and undo whatever it was that went wrong in their lives, the underlying question that has troubled them is the one of why. Why did things turn out the way they did?
For most of human history, people have struggled more with the other questions. Who is God? What has He done? Where can He be found? When can I know Him? And how?
But despite the why of the Book of Job, why is more of a modern question. It is a step beyond the more basic questions. That Job asked them may make him the first “modern” man.
Today, in 2015, the other questions of life pale in light of the question of why. Science has told us much, but why still eludes us. By its very nature, why is a transcendent question.
And this brings us to the American Church.
If I could categorize 2014’s chatter about the Church, one of the top three topics would be, Where have all the churchgoers gone? This lament is everywhere and everyone has an observation and an answer. (Though some good detective work will show that the actual number of supposedly “former” attendees is not so much avoiding church altogether. Instead, they still attend, only not every week as they once did, which makes the attendance numbers on any given Sunday lower, making it seem as if those people have dropped out entirely, which is not the case. Lies, damned lies, and statistics, right?)
What I see almost none of the handwringers noting is what I think is behind much of the drop–or the more sporadic attendance. And it goes back to fish and time machines.
When today’s church tries to answer the cry of why, the common response is to point to God’s sovereignty. And this proves problematic, because the Church is mistakenly assuming something.
For the mass of men, there is only the fish. When these men go to church, they get a bad rock concert atmosphere that stands in for transcendence. They get a message delivered by someone who experienced something transcendent a long time ago and has been running on the fumes of it for years now.
Most men go to church, experience nothing transcendent, fail to use amid the assembly the gifts God has given them to any appreciable measure, barely interact with their fellows, and then stumble off to a fishing hole on a bleak, frozen pond to get some fish. Because there is nothing else but the fish.
These men go to church on Sunday with the question of why eating holes in their guts, and the church tries to answer that transcendent question with a supposedly transcendent answer, yet nothing of those men’s experience in church from week to week ever takes them anywhere into the genuine transcendent light of God. You can’t meet transcendent needs of people who are stuck thinking only of fish, if all you can talk about is the fish itself. And churches today are absolutely mired in talking about the fish.
You can blame the leaders, but the fact is, most of them are generations removed from the last transcendent moves of God in this country. A lot of them are struggling themselves with the blandness of their spiritual lives.
Most people experience nothing of the transcendent moves of the Holy Spirit on any given Sunday, and we do next to nothing to empower men and women to serve each other in the midst of the assembly, so their spiritual gifts–one very real connection to transcendence–go unused.
Every day it seems I hear of another Evangelical who has “swum the Tiber,” looking for transcendence in the Roman Catholic Church, but I’m not sure the Catholics have got the transcendence thing down any better than the Protestants do, especially in America.
Or else you see once solid Christians incorporating Eastern spirituality into their beliefs, a surefire way to dash themselves on the rocks of heresy.
And it’s all because we have a serious lack transcendence in our churches today. Coincidentally, all my thinking on this started with Thoreau, and only as I sat down to write it did I recall that he was labeled a Transcendentalist. How fitting.
When human beings ask why, they will only be satisfied with the kind of answer the Church gives today if that same Church is taking those people to a place–and person–of transcendence week after week. People who experience no genuine transcendence in the day to day will simply shrug off our answers, especially if for all our talk of transcendence, we don’t deliver or experience it either.
We live in a world of the mundane, largely of our own making. For most, there is only the fish and nothing else. To solve the problems of mankind, the Church in America has got to rediscover transcendence.
The Church knows there is something more than the fish. If we’re not reinforcing this in everything we say and do, both on Sunday and during the rest of the week, then we will not be offering the one thing that people desperately need, even if they are unaware of that need.
God help us if our own experience of transcendence is as empty as the people we’re attempting to save.
How Christians Can Demolish Atheism with a Word
StandardI’ve been listening to Unbelievable, a British podcast that pits Christians and atheists against each other on popular topics. Often, the battle is purely head-to-head, with no other topic than why atheism or why Christianity is true or not.
Here in the States, we had a slow news cycle leading up to the Olympics, so the Ken Ham and Bill Nye debate took on a life of its own, with even the secular press touting the “event.”
Urg.
I say this because all this logic and carefully worded argumentation misses the point. While I can see atheists not understanding how the point is lost, that Christians can’t see beyond is most troubling and says much about the state of the Church in the West.
What Christians forget is what places the Christian Church above all other religious groups and systems, including atheism. Christians believe God put His Spirit into each believer, which both empowers and grants the ability to experience true relationship with God through Jesus.
No Spirit, no Church. End of story.
And yet Christians almost never go to the Spirit when confronting atheism.
All the reasoned logic in the world is unlikely to sway modern skeptics. We can appeal to Paul’s example at the Areopagus, but what was new to the ears of the Stoics and Epicureans in Paul’s day has had nearly 2,000 years to accumulate rebuttals. Reason alone cannot be our primary weapon.
While the Bible is God’s special revelation to mankind and contains what we need to know to have faith and to live the Christian life, many do not acknowledge it as such. To any who saw the Ham and Nye debate, Ham’s repeated returns to Scripture fell on Nye’s deaf ears. This is NOT to say the Bible as God’s Word is inadequate in some way, only that many have inoculated themselves against it when it is used alone.
But there is a word that can stop an atheist argument in its tracks. Why Christians today don’t use it is one of the great losses of our generation.
That word? The word of knowledge.
Yes, the charismatic gift.
A Christian and an atheist arguing presuppositions about the origin of matter can dispense with all the bilateral systematic dismantling if the Christian would simply say, “Your mother told you when you were 13 that she wished she had never conceived you , and you struggle daily to recover from rejection, don’t you?” Or how about “God revealed to me that you’ve been cheating on your spouse for the last two years”?
Any Christian out there wonder if that would change the direction of the debate?
If we’re talking whether God exists or not, connecting with the supernatural is the natural course of argument. A spoken word of knowledge immediately dismantles all opposition. Immediately. People who claim God does not exist must now explain that word of knowledge. Let them try. They won’t succeed. NOW who is on the defensive?
See, God intended us to be more than a Word Church. He intended us to be a Word + Power Church.
In the sidebar of this blog is an ad for Gospel for Asia. When you read the testimonies of the missionaries involved in that organization, nearly all came from non-Christian homes, and nearly all had some power encounter because of a missionary coming into their homes and bringing a miracle of some kind. Supernatural healing, deliverance, words of knowledge, words of wisdom, whatever—the Word was accompanied by a Spirit-filled believer operating in supernatural Power. The result was faith.
You see, the arguments against the Lord went dead in the face of God working through His people in power.
Is it any wonder why atheism has revived in the age of a Western Church that more likely than not DENIES the operation of the charismata? And is it any wonder that the Church is moving forward in leaps and bounds in those places where Christians place no such restrictions on the Spirit moving through charismatic gifts?
American Church, are you listening?
Get the gifts moving again and see the arguments against God crumble. Because they will.
And one more thing…
We always like to say that Christianity is not a religion but a relationship. Why then do we Christians never press the relationship reality when we debate atheists? Why is it always a battle of logic? If knowing Christ is eternal life and relationship with Him is the cornerstone of our Faith, why do Christians never bring up this living relationship with Christ when talking with atheists? Ravi Zacharias is about the only apologist I ever hear who gets to the heart of relationship with Christ when discussing the uniqueness of Christianity and its superiority. More of us need to talk about our vital relationship with Christ with our atheist friends.
For too long the discussion has been from our heads. It’s time to take it back to relationship with Christ and to Word + Power. Because that’s what makes Christianity the only true answer.