Best of Cerulean Sanctum

Dissing Discernment

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Fork aheadThree weeks ago in church, one of our elders quoted T.D. Jakes.

My head nearly exploded.

You see, T.D. Jakes is a cult leader. He’s not a Christian—at least by the standards of orthodoxy. As a leader in a Oneness Pentecostal church group, he denies the classical understanding of the Trinity. (See update below.) Yet Jakes shows up on numerous “approved” lists of Evangelicals that circulate on the Web and in print media. Just the other day, our YMCA (an organization championed by historic Christian evangelist Dwight Moody) held a book sale to raise money. One table included Christian materials. I suspect a quarter of the books had Jakes’s doughy, smiling face on the cover.

A few days later in one of our small groups, someone mentioned a book by another Oneness Pentecostal without understanding the theology. He’d never heard of them or their beliefs.

In my younger days, cults crawled out of the woodwork. Mo Berg, Victor Paul Weirwille, Herbert Armstrong—we knew these guys and knew to stay far away from their pernicious brands of deviancy. I used to spend hours reading up on Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons just so I could show them the truth.

Now you’ve got Mormon books showing up in Christian bookstores and Mitt Romney giving the commencement address at Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

Times were that the marks of a cult stood out like a sore thumb. Three doctrinal denials will usually reveal a cult:

  1. Denial of the Trinity
  2. Denial of the efficacy of Christ’s blood to cleanse from all sins
  3. Denial of the sufficiency of faith in Christ alone for salvation

Apply those three to any religious organization or leader and they’ll snare cultists with an efficiency close to 100 percent.

In most cases, you don’t have to go any further than looking for a group’s flawed view on the Trinity to unmask it as a cult. Nothing marks the uniqueness of orthodox Christianity than the belief that God exists in three full, unique persons in one essence. We believe the unity of the Godhead in essence, the Godhead’s diversity in persons. And we’ve believed that fundamental understanding of the nature of God since the founding of the Church by Christ Himself.

How fundamental? As I see it, every doctrine we hold dear in the Church must begin with the nature of God Himself. If we fumble that, everything that proceeds from it takes on a warped perspective. For instance, the very love of God cannot be properly understood from a Oneness perspective, for the love the members of the Trinity possess for each other expresses itself in God’s love for us and our love for each other. Our concept of what love means can only be fully understood if we acknowledge that God is Trinitarian in nature.

In fact, I can’t see how anyone can possible read the Bible and not see the Trinity on every page. Consider even Deuteronomy 6:4—Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one—the word “one” there is not the word for a single person (yahid), but a unified personna (ehad). We see the same word ehad in reference to husband and wife being one (ehad) flesh. How appropriate that the ecstatic love the Triune God experiences within His persons reflects in the joining of husband and wife, while also mirroring the unification of Christ and the Church in the imagery of Bridegroom and Bride. I’m also one who believes that Man is a tripartite being (body, soul, spirit) in the same way that God is triune, further reflecting the idea that we are made in the image of God.

Just inches away on my library shelf sits James White’s The Forgotten Trinity. Check it out. For more on the error of Oneness (historically known in several minor variants as Sebellianism, Patripassionism, or Modalism), check out Theopedia.

I spoke with the elder Sunday morning about his reference. He wasn’t familiar with Oneness Pentecostals, their beliefs, or the fact that T.D. Jakes is a non-Trinitarian. He expressed surprise about Jakes and he staunchly defended Trinitarianism. While I wasn’t happy about the Jakes quote, I absolutely understood the elder made the comment without knowing the truth about Jakes.

This brings us to the meat of this post.

So why do we diss discernment? The elder made a telling statement as we talked, “There are so many variants of Pentecostalism, it’s hard to know exactly what each believes.” That’s a legitimate comment on Pentecostalism—and Christianity in general. So much fracturing and splintering over a couple millennia have left us all a bit strung out. When the Lord speaks to the seven Churches in Asia in Revelation, it’s hard to miss the different flavors of practice and belief already evident.

I’ve made the Church my study, but I still can’t tell you what the Ukrainian Orthodox believe differently from the Russian Orthodox. Or Regular Baptists from Bible Baptists. I could give you generalities, but generalities won’t cut it when trying to discern truth from error.

The sheer mass of Christian (and pseudo-Christian) thought multiplied over thousands of belief statements is daunting. No wonder so many Christians appear baffled. Still, we can’t excuse our lack of diligence.

In the charismatic and pentecostal ranks, you tend to see a lot of cult of personality issues. Folks get sidetracked by big name preachers and ministries. Prophets, apostles, deacons, elders, pastors—stick a title on someone (usually self-affixed by the Christian celebrity in question) and you’ll find people who immediately succumb to slavish devotion. Obviously, the chance for delusion runs high. Sadly, once a leader proves to have feet of clay, the defrauded simply move onto another hero. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Folks outside charismatic and pentecostal circles will, of course, laugh and mock any follower of Benny Hinn or Jack Van Impe, but those mockers aren’t immune to deception. My experience shows that rather than falling prey to dynamic individuals, the noncharismatics/Pentecostals fall for an even more insidious lie: power structures and systems. They get sucked into thinking governments, organizations (Christian or not), and even church hierarchies are the means by which the world revolves. The faithful tack a veneer of godliness over the top of power structures, but the core’s still ungodly. These folks end up perpetrating great injustices against the poor, disenfranchised, powerless, and even each other, as a result.

Don’t laugh at someone else, because I can promise that all of us have drunk (or are still drinking) from some soul-corroding teat. Even the best of us get off-track or stumble in little ways. Let’s all be humble here.

I talk about discernment quite a bit on Cerulean Sanctum. On the whole, I think it’s the greatest lack in the Church today. I think five reasons drive this:

  1. We’re too busy – Busy people nod their heads and unthinkingly accept whatever comes their way. That’s a recipe for disaster. While the sheer number of lies out there overwhelms the average person, God still holds us accountable for truth.
  2. We’re too apathetic – “Does discernment matter? Why should I care?” Paul warns that many have shipwrecked their faith by lack of discernment. Rank pragmatism within many Christian hearts pushes discernment into the background because its raison d’être doesn’t immediately leap out. We don’t understand that God’s people perish for lack of knowledge and that this knowledge is beneficial for own its sake—because God said we need to know it.
  3. We think we’ve arrived – We’re saved now, so what? But eternal security isn’t license for spiritual sloth. Too many Christians think they’re in, but then fail to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. That fear and trembling includes godly discernment.
  4. We’re naïvely optimistic – Jesus didn’t tempt God by taking a leap off the top of the Temple. The same Enemy that tempted the Lord tempts us. He’s a master at deceiving us into thinking we’re immune from the mess our neighbors made of their lives. It never dawns on us that we could go down in flames, too. So when the Enemy tells us to jump off, we do. That’s pride, and it’s from the pit of hell.
  5. We’re not drilled on discernment – People quote 1 John 1:4 (Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world), but it’s always for some other person in some other church at some other time. Our church leaders should have that 1 John 1:4 filter up at all times and show us how to keep it up as well.

As for me, I side with Jesus here:

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.
—John 2:23-25

In this day and age, it’s foolish for any Christian to go blindly out into the world. Jesus had His filter on at all times. He knew the evil that lurked in the hearts of men, so He did not trust them.

That’s wisdom for us, folks. Begin at skepticism. Never assume someone is telling you the truth, no matter how trusted that teacher/leader/pastor/friend might be. Let God alone be true and every man a liar (Romans 3:4). The Scriptures are our source. The Holy Spirit is our interpreter. Run everything you hear past those two. Any human is capable of error, even this writer. Don’t take everything I say as gospel truth. Prove it against the Word of God. Correct me if I need it. I expect nothing less.

Thanks to all who contributed. I’ll unpack some of your comments from Friday’s post tomorrow.

 (Update: I made an error in currently assigning Jakes to the United Pentecostal Church. He was once affiliated with that Oneness church, was ordained a bishop in another Oneness denomination, and currently is a high-ranking leader within another Oneness church group. I regret the error.)

The Church of Gil Gunderson

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Recently, I spoke with a young man who possesses a rare gift. Though he knew he had the gift, he didn’t see it for what it was, deciding to pursue other avenues rather than let his gift take him in a logical direction. Now that he’s burned out other options, he’s regretting all the choices he made that diverted him off the path his gift created for him. He’s not sure he can get back on the path, confessing that getting off it was perhaps the most lunkheaded thing he’s done in his life.

You can see the regret painted over his face.

I saw his train wreck coming. Everyone who knows him did. I’ve prayed for him a few times since. I believe he’ll be okay in the end. Though I thought he blew it at the time, I’m encouraged that he’s wised up. Most guys his age would’ve taken years to come to their senses. His confession holds out hope he’ll be able to turn his bad choice around.

Few topics nag at men more than this one: What might have been.

In contrast to the young man I just mentioned, I know dozens of men who thought they knew the best way to go, only to find the path dead-ending after years of travel. Most of the time, it’s a career cul-de-sac. They got into a particular line of work and it vanished, went overseas, proved soul-killing, demanded moral compromise, or some other unimagined outcome. Now they don’t know what to do.

I feel for these guys. No one knows what to tell them.

I’ve written page upon page here at Cerulean Sanctum about the invisible nature of our employment. Invisible, at least, to the Church in America. Sure, maybe once every five years you’ll hear a sermon about how to be a good employee, but most preachers never examine the nature of work itself and how it impacts the soul—especially when it all goes wrong.

Nothing we do in a day competes with work for the sheer amount of time consumed. Despite this, I suspect that in most Christian households, work alters more of the way we live than anything else, even more than our confession of Christ.

Untrue? Well, check how everything in our day revolves around work, even our devotional lives. If Christ were all that important, our work would be a blip in the day compared to how we live out our discipleship. A look at the typical family will tell otherwise. It’s almost impossible to separate our jobs from even the the most minute aspects of our lives.

Which is why the man who finds himself in a dead-end job or habitually unemployed in his “peak earning years” presents such a difficult puzzle.

I used to enjoy The Simpsons. One of the recurring characters is Gil Gunderson, a parody of the Jack Lemmon character in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. The running gag with Gil concerns his series of humiliating jobs and the utter desperation that surrounds him like a haze. He’s always hoping that the next deal’s the one that will save him, but instead we see him reduced to so much human grist for the corporate mill.

I know plenty of guys like Gil. They wake up one day and realize their one chance at the brass ring passed them by years ago.

Some try to reinvent themselves. I saw this in spades out in Silicon Valley. When the Internet bubble first showed signs of bursting, companies ditched gobs of forty-something guys, the ones who did all the dirty work in the startup days but earned a few too many cost of living increases. How did these guys respond? They all became consultants. The Valley teemed with consultants of all kinds, each little guy desperate to find his one tiny morsel in the limited consultancy pot. They’d crow about how they empowered themselves, but you knew every single one was sweating blood at night praying some company would rescue them out of the hell of making $5,000 a year as a “consultant.”

Next stop, real estate. Then what?

I hear they’re hiring for the crab boats.

You find a lot of these guys in the ministry, too. When they were young, nothing fit, and the ministry looked like the only option. They end up hanging around for decades, their ministry amounting to a mound of legumes.

On the other hand, you’ve got some guys with a calling bigger than the planet, yet one church after another treats them like bubble gum stuck to the bottom of their congregational shoe. They wind up pincushions for whatever the pitchfork-toting natives dream up.

I feel for both. I feel for all men discouraged in their work, ministry or not.

I’ll probably never understand in this life why this happens to decent guys who work hard. I got an e-mail today from a guy talking about how bosses praise and praise till their oxygen runs low, gushing over the unmatched skills of the one receiving praise, yet the praisee’s the first one pink-slipped after Conglomo Corporation suffers a less than stellar quarter. And for what reason? Who knows? Guys who muddle through this never find out.

What can the Church do for the Gils of this world? How can we help?

I think about this nearly every day. My wife and I have discussed starting a ministry that meets the needs of people in just this fix, but we never get any clear direction on how to start. Nebulous social issues resist change simply because framing their limits proves so difficult.

What do you do for a fifty-year-old autoworker who’s been one all his life but discovers himself on the unemployment line with no one hiring? What’s he going to transition into?

Again, back in my Silicon Valley days, I saw plenty of guys burnout in their careers, yet somehow they found a way to start a completely different one. After years of watching some Midwest guys try the same thing, I now understand how the Silicon Valley guys successfully segue from the boardroom to handmaking bicycles in Marin: They’re filthy rich.

Sadly, that assembly line guy isn’t rolling in the kind of cash that allows him to self-finance his whim. So I don’t know what to tell him.

The stock market drop spooked people. Not much of a drop as I saw it, but that jittery look’s returning to some faces. The Cincinnati Business Courier is sponsoring a symposium for business leaders on how to prepare for the looming U.S. economic disaster. Talk about inspiring positive energy!

I want to help men left wondering what might have been, the Gils of the world. I think we in the Church need to get our collective acts together to brainstorm this issue because it’s only going to get worse. Greenspan dropped the word “recession” the other day and, despite the fact he’s no longer the Fed Chairman, grown men soiled themselves.

It’s bad enough we’re minting Gils. (Look around. They may seem invisible, but they exist in numbers too large to ignore.) Now imagine a country filled with them.

What’s the American Church’s response?

Fumbling the Torch

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Our television died last weekend.

My parents had a 70’s-era Sony for 25 years. Our JVC lasted only 11. Bought it for my wife when we were engaged. (The vacuum my parents bought us for our wedding croaked this last summer. Thankfully, the marriage still holds up.)

Toward the end of our TV’s life, the favored fix for its tendency to scrunch the entire image down to a line a quarter-inch thick across the middle of the screen consisted of an authoritative whack to its cabinet. Kapow! and the picture would balloon to normal size. Over the last six months, it resembled a speed bag more than a television. Last Saturday, no amount of throttling on my part could bring it back.

Given that a new television compliant with the FCC-mandated digital requirements will set us back a minimum of $750, we may simply have to do without. It’s just the way things are right now.

Though I wish things were not that way, my television viewing’s fallen off to a limit approaching zero since The X-Files went off the air, anyway. Back during its network run, I taped nearly every episode, my devotion to the show evident in my inability to participate in any event that coincided with it, for fear some drunk would crash into a power line somewhere and erasing my carefully crafted programming of the VCR. That, of course, didn’t happen—except on the one night I had no choice but attend an event. The episode in question just so happened to be the infamous inbred family one, which FOX elected never to run again. Ever. Of course.

But that slavish devotion taught me never again to surrender time to TV. I haven’t followed anything since and probably never will.

(Readers: “So, Dan, where does this boring intro actually lead?”)

Imagine a campfire on the plains of Palestine circa 200 AD. A dozen people gather ’round its warmth, trading stories. At one point, the elder of the group stands up and tells of Jesus, His ways, and how those ways became the ways of their people. He talks for an hour, while the younger ones trade questions with him, learning, absorbing. Tomorrow night, the conversation will be similar, but varied enough to take others to a fractionally deeper place than the night before. The faces might be different this night, the main storyteller another of the wise ones, but what lingers in the cooling night air contains the same truth, the same life-giving wisdom.

On some nights, stories surrender to music. But the music doesn’t jar with the oral traditions. No, it reinforces truth, resembling what was taught and told, only in words set to rhythm and melody.

Night after night, this is how it unfolds for those people. This is their entertainment and their revelation.

My parents’ generation was the first to adopt television. I will argue that theirs was the first with a soundtrack from cradle to grave, too. They embodied the first completely media-savvy generation.

And for that reason, my generation got ripped off. My son’s generation will be, also. And his son’s.

Media stole the passed torch. It distracted those who came before us from their primary duty of ensuring the wisdom of the ages survived into the next generation. Whatever that wisdom may have been, that generation preferred the dull gray light of a cathode ray tube, or the voice of a box of transistors, to passing on the only things worth saving.

In time, their newly adopted habits combined with the islandization of the cities and the suburbs to destroy community as known by the denizens of Palestine 200AD. Work habits changed, and employment moved far from home. Every day. Connections withered. Who we were supposed to be in our souls got lost amid The Honeymooners and Little Richard.

My entire twenties consisted of the relentless drone of young Christians around me repeating the the same mantra over and over: “I wish I could find a mentor.” Sorry, but the mentor couldn’t pry himself away from Charlie’s Angels.

But who could blame him? He slaved in an office in some nondescript tower of glass and steel all day, had no one pouring life back into him, so what did he have to give at the end of the day? Better just to tune into Laugh In and tune out for an hour or two than to step out of the cultural programming and back into something older and more lasting.

I look around today and can’t help but think it’s infinitely worse. Cruise the Godblogosphere long enough and it seems like everyone’s glued to a 50″ plasma display OR an iPod OR a PS3 OR the two dozen flicks at the multiplex OR some pointless Internet distraction. Meanwhile, the next generation’s holding out their hands, dying for what little got passed on to us.

So the threads of tradition thin and weaken. Trivia replaces wisdom. Words lose to throwaway images.

Meanwhile, the thief breaks in to steal and destroy. And he plunders the entire house because the homeowner couldn’t pry his attention away from Lost or American Idol or 24 or some other pointless entertainment guaranteed to burn on Judgment Day.

Hey, I know that’s a tough word, folks, but we’re fiddling while America burns. It’s one thing for Christians to be culturally-savvy in cultural distinctives that last for generations, but quite another to be so enamored of pop-cultural artifacts that won’t stand up to a decade’s time.

If the best we can give our kids when they move away from home is the complete DVD collection of The Office or our Radiohead box-set, how is Jesus going to get a word in edge-wise?

But He’s Jesus, right? He’ll find a way to compete!

Can we hear ourselves? What life is going to flow into those kids? And into their kids?

My generation got mugged on the way to “maturity.” My parents did a decent job and were good people, but they still suffered from media distractions. They fell prey to disconnection and fractured community. My mother’s generational wisdom should’ve fed me, but by the time I realized I needed it, she was too far gone to help. And I didn’t know I needed it because I was too lost in my own media-driven stupor. Because the generation before me was, too. It was all I knew.

In the end, the torch I should be passing on to my child resembles a paper matchstick.

All that wisdom—gone. When my parent’s generation dies off entirely, so goes heritage, at least for many like me. We won’t remember all the second and third cousins. We won’t know how Christ changed that one great-uncle. Those salvation stories won’t be repeated around campfires any longer. The Bible passages that changed a generation will retreat into the book, to be remembered no more. And the hard-earned wisdom gained through decades of walking with Christ will blow away like dust along with the folks who learned it through bloody prayer, but took it to their graves.

What a grievous loss!

I wish we could grab our old people by the lapels and beg, “Don’t die before you instill in us what you learned about Christ. If you’ve been to the secret places, show us how to get there, too!” Don’t leave our generation to reflect on what might have been!

You know what I wish more of us did on Sunday? Rather than the same old, same old, why not begin a quarterly recollection Sunday (and center it around a full church meal and communion), where people tell stories of how Jesus changed their lives. How He came through and led out of the darkness. Have our kids hear those stories from people besides us for a change. Show them the relevancy of Christ from one generation to the next. And please God, send the fire on us so those stories burn with miracles and deliverance and the kind of supernatural power that proves to the next generation that “Awesome God” isn’t just a tired old song on the radio.

 

Because that’s the kind of thinking we must resurrect if the generation that follows us is going to have any sense of purpose and history to pass on to their children.

{Image: Rembrandt—Jacob Blessing the Children of Joseph, 1656}