Discernment: What’s Your Schema
The question I most commonly hear as a Bible teacher and writer is this: How can you know what God’s will is?
It’s a very broad question. I have had a few things to say about it over the years, and even wrote a book, When People Speak for God, in order to talk about hearing from God in various ways and using discernment. There are plenty of claims to speak for God. How can one be certain?
One key element is taught by Paul in Romans 12:2 –
2 Conform no longer to the pattern of this present world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds. Then you will be able to discern the will of God, and to know what is good, acceptable, and perfect.
The Revised English Bible (Cambridge; New York; Melbourne; Madrid; Cape Town; Singapore; São Paulo; Delhi; Dubai; Tokyo: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ro 12:2.
“Conform” in this translation comes from the Greek word suschematizw (loosely transliterated). If you look carefully at that word, you’ll see “schema” in the middle. And thus my title.
Now let me warn you quickly that you cannot determine the meaning of words in one language by means of etymology. There’s a name for this, the etymological fallacy. Someone announces that a certain word comes from Latin or Greek (or whatever) and therefore means what its ancestor meant in that language.
I like to counter this just a bit with what I call the anti-etymological fallacy, which says that while etymology doesn’t determine meaning, it can be enlightening. In this case, it is.
This verse tells us that there is a pattern, a way of thinking that belongs to the world in general. If we follow that pattern, we’re going to think like the world. Note here that Paul is not telling us that the world is always wrong about everything. Rather, he’s telling us that the world has a different pattern, a different way of organizing the information, and this results in different ways of thinking and acting.
It’s the pattern of thinking that Paul is here to address. The schema, if you please.
I’ve been working on information for search engines and AI models to include in the header of my web pages. There will be such a schema in the header for this page. It gives information about authorship, content, images, post series, and other connections. For example, it will list me as owner of my company Energion Publications, which can tell people something about me. Yesterday I found an error in the script generating the schema. By the end of the day today, that error will be corrected. Why? Because having the correct schema is important in helping people understand the basis for what I say. What have I studied? Where have I taught? What have I written? The schema is designed to guide people to think of me in a certain way.
If you’ve ever created a resume for a job hunt, you’ve created such a schema, just not in machine readable language. You present your education, your job experience, and your references in a certain way to guide a reader to come to a particular conclusion. A recruiter once had me prepare a number of resumes directed at different specific job opportunities. I told him I didn’t want to lie. He said, “You won’t lie. You just arrange the truth differently.” That’s what a schema does.
That’s why I think we can say that Paul is telling you not to accept the world’s schema for understanding everything, but rather we’re supposed to be transformed, we find a new way of thinking. Paul says, “Then you will be able to discern the will of God, and to know what is good, acceptable, and perfect.”
Recognizing the World’s Schema
So here we have step one in discernment is to get out of the world’s schema, and start following God’s schema. But what is that?
Let me tell you what I tell everyone about this. Start out by reading and meditating on scripture. Scripture gives the story of how God has worked in the world. I don’t mean memorizing the occasional text, or looking for a singular scripture that happens to support (or oppose) your next action. I mean be marinated in it. Make it the pattern for the way you think. That’s the broad answer.
Slightly narrower, but still challenging is to read the first 11 chapters of Romans, and lead your way into this verse through 12:1: “Therefore …” Paul has been providing his view of the way God has worked. Let me suggest that you’ll understand Paul better if you’ve read the rest of scripture, but this is a briefer statement.
A New Measuring Stick
Here, Paul follows up with a short statement that puts the results in a nutshell, I think:
3 By authority of the grace God has given me I say to everyone among you: do not think too highly of yourself, but form a sober estimate based on the measure of faith that God has dealt to each of you. 4 For just as in a single human body there are many limbs and organs, all with different functions, 5 so we who are united with Christ, though many, form one body, and belong to one another as its limbs and organs.
The Revised English Bible (Cambridge; New York; Melbourne; Madrid; Cape Town; Singapore; São Paulo; Delhi; Dubai; Tokyo: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ro 12:3-5.
I want to emphasize some key elements, but don’t let my schema for reading the verse keep you from seeing other things.
- Do not think too highly of yourself – this is often read as “think poorly of yourself” but that is not what Paul is saying. Otherwise, he’d continue, “but think of yourself as nothing” or something similar.
- Form a sober estimate based on the measure of faith that God has dealt to each of you – this is the key. You’re not moving the point where you place your self on a measurement of importance, intelligence, strength, agility, charisma, or any other characteristic. You’re changing the measuring stick. You now measure yourself by faith (something Paul has spent a good deal of time teaching in the earlier chapters), and that faith is God’s gift. So you’re measuring yourself as a recipient of a gift fo God’s grace, which is faith.
- We who are united in Christ, though many, form one body – building on those earlier chapters, Paul extrapolates this unity from the fact that who we are, what we are, is a gift that we are given, so we become one.
- Belong to one another – this is the conclusion, and it’s powerful. We are no longer independent individuals. Rather, we belong to one another in community.
In this way Paul challenges most of what we do and what we claim. As human beings, we have a strong urge to seek hierarchy, and particularly to seek higher positions in a hierarchy.
Protestants often claim this as superiority over Roman Catholics because “they have all those bishops and archbishops and even a Pope.” But the fact is that Protestants generally end up in just as much of a hierarchy. They just reference the positions by different names.
But authority structures in organizations are just one small element of our tendency toward hierarchy. Let’s look at some others:
Our Tendency Toward Hierarchy
- Intellectual – I have an MA in Religion concentrating in Biblical and Cognate Languages. Fancy sounding, no? It seems impressive when I’m in a local church, but if I go to a university or seminary, an MA degree barely gets me into conversations. There I need a PhD, and a good publication record, maybe a tenured or tenure-track position. But there is the temptation to think that I am superior to others because of my education. Now I don’t mean to say that education is not of value, but any intellectual capabilities are a gift, and belong to the body. They don’t exist to make me more important.
- Spiritual – there are those who look to superior spiritual leaders as more important. In some Charismatic or Pentecostal communities people seek after prayer from certain anointed individuals. Receiving such prayer and impartation makes one more connected and can provide one with more authority. It’s good to pray for one another, but any gifts received by any means, whether in a classroom or a prayer meeting will be corrupted if we use them to make ourselves superior and to give us a license to lord it over others.
- Organizational – the practice of ordination can work in this way as well. At one conference where my wife and I had taught, there was a time of prayer at the altar during the last meeting. All pastors were invited to pray for others, but though we were good enough to teach, we were apparently not good enough to pray for people. “Good enough” isn’t part of the equation. If I could have my way, I would ordain everyone who serves, janitor, ushers, and yes, pastors and teachers. And since I believe everyone should be serving, I believe in ordaining every member of the church to do the work God has called that person to do.
- Wealth – the idea that the richest should have the most power. If you’re tempted toward this sort of hierarchy, you should read the book of James. Wealth, even earned with my effort, is still a gift of God.
(I touched on the practical side of this in in an earlier post regarding church leadership structures and pastor burnout.)
Embracing a Servant’s Schema
Paul said that we belong to one another. Jesus said it another way:
25 So Jesus called them to him and said, ‘You know that, among the Gentiles, rulers lord it over their subjects, and the great make their authority felt. 26 It shall not be so with you; among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all—28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’
The Revised English Bible (Cambridge; New York; Melbourne; Madrid; Cape Town; Singapore; São Paulo; Delhi; Dubai; Tokyo: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Mt 20:25-28.
That’s going to require a whole new schema!
(Featured image was generated by Adobe Firefly using the Firefly Image 4 Ultra engine based on a prompt created by Gemini from reading the text of this post. I generated by post in my brain and typed it on an aging keyboard.)