Which Way do you Listen?

Recently Dave Black made a comment regarding the way in which we hold certain correct doctrines (HT: Dave Black Online. I’m just going to quote one sentence here, which was as much as I could quote in a tweet:

… sometimes even biblically correct positions can be reduced to a dogmatic narrowness, formalism, and fundamentalism.

Before you read on, go ahead and read the entire quote.

Did you read it? Now ask yourself this: Just how did I hear that?

The reason I ask that question is that the topic in the full quotation is patriarchy, something to which I am not particularly attracted. It is very easy for me to read the one sentence, which I believe tells us something very important about the way in which we hold our viewpoints even, and perhaps especially, our correct ones, as a particular attack on patriarchy or some other conservative position.

Perhaps you think something like: “I sure hope those folks who advocate patriarchy are listening! They think they’re right and all the rest of us are lost!”

If you like patriarchy, you might feel that Dave Black is coming after you, and thus reject the statement because you believe it’s directed against a viewpoint you favor. (For what it’s worth, I think patriarchy is actually incidental to the statement. You could substitute many terms for it in that paragraph and get the same result–but offend different people with it!)

But neither of those reactions is all that helpful in my view. The reason I chose to tweet the particular selection that I did is that it addresses something to which we are all tempted–making our pet projects or ideas the center. Paul Tillich defined idolatry as treating something as ultimate that is not actually ultimate (I paraphrase).

As Christians, the gospel should be ultimate, which in turns means that Jesus should be ultimate, because that is what the gospel says. But quite frequently we make our particular take on the details our ultimate. We turn to worshiping not God, but a mental idol that we have put in God’s place.

What’s even more dangerous is that once we have made that “concept idol” we become less and less capable of hearing the very proper challenges to our idol and the pedestal on which we have placed it. We hear the challenges to the idols of others. Egalitarians, such as myself, can quite clearly see the dangers of patriarchy and hear clearly when its place on the pedestal is challenged. “Tear down that idol!” we shout!

But have we made our own idols? Too often we have.

I believe that we Christians trust the Holy Spirit very little. If we truly believed that the Holy Spirit would teach and empower people, I think we would be less concerned to force them into our mold and more concerned to encourage and enable them to study, meditate, pray, and hear from the Holy Spirit themselves.

I could be wrong about just about everything. I very often have been, and assume I still am! God can teach me through my stupidity, my carelessness, or my stubbornness. But if I become convinced that I have nothing to learn, that I have nailed down all the details, learning will stop. What would then be an even greater tragedy would be if I tried to impose those final, absolute answers on others.