Anti-intellectualism

Every now and again, the critique is raised of evangelicalism that it is anti-intellectual.  I think that critique is in some ways fair, and in others not so much.  Here is a little exploration of anti-intellectualism with some thoughts on how we can renew a Christian intellectual culture in our churches.

Firstly, I want to point out that there is a good, justified, and theologically well-founded anti-intellectualism which rests on two distinct grounds.  The first is that God's wisdom is not the wisdom of the world.  "Since, in God's wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached."  The message of the cross contradicts the wisdom of this age; the deep-thinkers of the world stumble over the apparent foolishness on display in the crucified God.  When the Apostle tells us that Christ Jesus "became wisdom from God for us", he is not only establishing where wisdom is, but also telling us where it is not.  Christ became wisdom for us by going to the cross, by demolishing everything that the human intellect would naturally think about God.  This demolition job goes to the foundations of natural thinking about God.  It is not that we mostly had God right, but were surprised by this one thing that he has done.  Christ who becomes wisdom for us in the incarnation and supremely at the cross is in himself and from eternity the Wisdom of God.  The apparent foolishness of the cross goes to the heart of who God is, and the fact that the cross appears foolish to us when in fact it is wisdom which reflects the eternal Life and Being of God is a sound rebuke to human intellect.

The second ground for anti-intellectualism is grace.  I think this is where a lot of evangelical anti-intellectualism comes from.  God doesn't expect us to climb up to him, either morally or intellectually; he comes down to us.  The message of the cross is devastatingly simple.  An infant can begin to understand it.  There are no theology exams for salvation; simply, child-like trust is all that is required.  Wherever an intellectual barrier is erected which seems to threaten the simplicity of the gospel, a certain amount of anti-intellectualism is justified and indeed required.

However, anti-intellectualism is not itself a good thing.  From the fact that God has created us with brains and the ability to engage in more or less complex reasoning, we really ought to assume that he wants us to use them - and why, if we are called to use them in life generally, would we not be expected to use them in understanding God and his works?  In fact already in the Scriptures and then in the Tradition of the church we see plenty of rigorous intellectual work, grappling with the reality of God's revelation, seeking to describe it and trace out its implications.  What puts people off that sort of work in the church?

To an extent in evangelicalism I think it is, as already mentioned, the desire to keep the simple gospel simple.  Fair enough, as far as it goes.  But we do our own faith, and our appeal to outsiders, no favours if we decline to engage in thought about what we believe.  The danger looms of a purely subjective faith - I believe it because I believe it - with so little intellectual content, so little concern to explain what we believe and why, and so little effort to connect this faith to a general view of the world, that it becomes unassailable but also inexplicable.  The gospel is simple, but it is also huge in its claims and its implications, and really the church does need to take up the task of exploring and explaining these.

There is also, if I read things correctly, an unhelpful biblicism at work.  Of course evangelicals are Bible people; that's the whole big idea.  But when the Bible is used as if answers can just be read off the surface of the text, and as if any attempt to reflect more deeply on how those answers join up, whether certain parts of the text might be key for interpreting and applying other parts, whether the text might imply a metaphysical hinterland (and perhaps foreground) - well, then I think we're in trouble.  Holy Scripture doesn't work that way.  If we insist on just sticking to the words and formulations of the Bible, we may well end up in heresy - many heretics have been very keen on the text of Scripture! - but at the least we will miss the depths of what is being portrayed in Scripture.

If we want to avoid anti-intellectualism in our churches and foster a thoughtful theological culture, I think we need to consider a few points.  Firstly, those of us who like theology and read big books for fun need to rein it in.  It is very easy for theology enthusiasts to give the impression that they have graduated from the simple gospel to something more profound.  In reality, there is nothing more profound.  Those who have done the most intellectual work need to be able to speak the language of simple faith in church, even as they hope to guide people deeper into that simple gospel.  Even as we go deeper, it should be very evident that we are going deeper into the same message, and certainly not moving on from it.  And this should be clear not only in what gets said, but where the focus and the enthusiasm are.  I get nervous when people seem more excited about metaphysics than they are about Christ crucified.

Second, the links between the Bible and theology need to be clearly spelt out, and it needs to be absolutely clear that the Bible is in the driving seat.  I have no time for that approach that says you need the Nicene Creed or whatever in order to properly understand the Bible.  Rather, I want to show that the Bible itself teaches Nicene Trinitarianism, because that is how God has revealed himself.  There is a temptation for theologians to scorn those who just want to stick to the Bible; instead, why not help people to see that sticking with the Bible is exactly what we want to do, and that the way to do it is to think through the nature and identity of the God revealed in the Bible?

Finally, we need to be clear that the intellectual work of the church is not intended to make the message of the cross appear wise to the world.  Clever folk who are converted to Christ will need to keep on putting to death their natural wisdom in order to start thinking on the basis of God's wisdom - in order to have the mind of Christ, to think on the basis of Christ in the wisdom which the Spirit displays.  Thinking that starts from Jesus and returns to Jesus, making much of him - that is what we need.

Don't grumble

 This morning the Lord has been gently rebuking me from 1 Corinthians 10:10:

And don't grumble as some of them did, and were killed by the destroyer.

The context is the apostle Paul's reflection on the history of Israel as a type of Christian experience.  The Israelites were (typologically) baptised at the Red Sea; they ate (typologically) spiritual food in the manna and drank (typologically) spiritual drink from the rock.  They were fully initiated, and fully provided for - "nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them,  since they were struck down in the wilderness."

In the context of Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians, the primary application is to avoid idolatry and immorality.  And yet in the midst of the warnings against idol worship and moral laxity is this verse about grumbling.  Don't grumble; the grumblers were destroyed.

But how can I avoid grumbling in circumstances like these?

Well, "God is faithful".  He will not allow more temptation than you can bear.  He will provide a way out (v 13) - not, to be sure, from the circumstances, but from the temptation to sin which comes with the circumstances.  The Israelites were in the wilderness, and no doubt felt they had plenty to complain about.  But their grumbling was their destruction.  Because in the midst of the wilderness, God was their faithful provider, if only they had opened their eyes to see it.  Sure, they wandered in a desert; but in that desert, the Rock followed them and provided them with drink - and that Rock was Christ.  An intriguing identification, which there is no need to explore here.  The point is that though I wander through a seemingly interminable lockdown, the Rock follows me; there is living water constantly on tap.

Stop grumbling, Daniel.  The Lord is at hand.

The Spirit and the spirits

You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 12:2-3

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.  By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.

1 John 4:1-3

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit who delights to exalt Jesus.  His mission in this last age is to bear witness to Christ, to open eyes to the reality of who Jesus was and is - and in this way to bring people to faith and into unity with Christ (and to reveal the reality of sin and judgement in those who will not believe).  Always his focus is Christ Jesus.

Sometimes people ask me 'how do we balance Jesus and the Spirit?' - meaning, how do we take seriously the objective revelation of God in Christ as Scripture bears witness to him, and also take seriously the mysterious subjective revelation of God in the Spirit?  The answer is that we don't.  Taking the Holy Spirit seriously means setting our spiritual eyes, our hearts, our minds on Christ Jesus.  Any spirit which distracts from Jesus, any spirit which does not exalt him, and spirit which does not confess his incarnation - his death, resurrection, and ascension - as the central reality of human history and each individual human life: that is not the Holy Spirit, but is the spirit of antichrist.

This can be subtle.  There is teaching which makes much of Jesus, but not quite enough.  There is teaching which makes Jesus the noblest of human beings (but not God, at least not in the fullest sense) - this is implicit in a lot of liberal teaching (and there is a lot of it masquerading as evangelicalism at the moment, but that's another matter); and there is teaching that makes Jesus divine in some sense (but not a real human being) - although this side of the equation is perhaps less popular in the current cultural moment.

But the Holy Spirit says 'Jesus is Lord' (that is, the LORD), and the Holy Spirit says 'Jesus came in the flesh' (that is, in genuine humanity, in which he suffered, died, and rose).

Test the spirits, and listen to the Spirit.

Weakness

Great to have Dan Steel from Magdalen Road Church preaching from 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:5 for us yesterday.  Lots of weakness in the passage.  The message looks weak and foolish, the people who believe are weak and foolish, the ministers of the gospel work by apparently weak and foolish means.  We would love it all to be stronger, more impressive - but as Dan pointed out, that's because we're glory thieves.  We want the gospel and the church to be (and be seen to be) strong, so that we can be confident in ourselves.  Instead, we are forced to be confident in God.

The logic of Paul's position shows that this is God's choice - it is deliberate.  God chooses to use 'weak' things so that we are forced to rely on him.  It might seem as if God is deliberately keeping us weak.  But the deeper logic is that it could not be any other way.  God must use 'weak' things and thus force us to rely on himself - because he is the only source of strength.  If God had given us a 'strong' message, called a 'strong' people - well, we would have ended up weak.  Weak.

Strength doesn't come through intermediate things, not really.  God does not and cannot impart strength through a message or a method which detaches us from himself.  The reason the gospel gives strength is because it highlights our weakness and binds us to God.

Elsewhere Paul tells the Corinthians that because of the Lord he can say 'when I am weak, then I am strong'.  This is so, because God's grace is perfected in weakness.  At various points I have wanted this to mean something like: when I am weak, it is only temporary, because God will shortly provide new strength.  But it isn't that.  It isn't that at all.  Right now, in my weakness, I am strong - but the strength isn't in me.  I am strong only because in my weakness I am forced to lean on God, the only strength.  God is strength, I am weakness.  I am strong only in so far as I am wholly dependent on him.

Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.  It is the waiting, the waiting on him, that brings strength.  The strength never becomes something in us, something we can bank for later; we can never get to a point where we need wait no longer.

So I guess the overall need that we have as churches and as individuals is to be so desperately weak, so thoroughly committed to the weak proclamation of a foolish message, that if anything is going to happen it will have to be God.  It will have to be him.

Little less conversation

"For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power."

In 1 Corinthians 4, Paul sees himself as up against people who talk a good game, especially when it comes to the kingdom of God and their part in it.  The position they seem to hold would probably nowadays be called 'over-realised eschatology' - they think they have all the blessings of the kingdom now, they think that they are reigning now, and (to pick up some hints from chapter 15 of the letter) they may even think that they have been resurrected now.

Paul's response to this and similar positions held in Corinth is the theology of the cross.  God displayed his power in the weakness of Christ crucified; God displayed his wisdom in the folly of Christ crucified.  Paul has modelled his ministry on Christ - perhaps not deliberately, perhaps just inevitably as he has sought faithfully to proclaim the gospel.  He hasn't been impressive, humanly speaking.  He hasn't come with strength or with glorious rhetoric.  He preached the weak and foolish cross, in a weak and foolish way, and God worked.

But within that context, Paul asserts that the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.

If there isn't a contradiction here, it must be a funny sort of power Paul is talking about here - a cruciform power, the power of God revealed in weakness.  But still, it's power.  It is all very well for these folk in Corinth to talk about their kingly enjoyment of the kingdom of God - which they seem to see displayed in exalted and lofty ideas, a refined spirituality, a liberation from the moral strictures of human society, a deliverance from the suffering that is the common lot of humanity.  But Paul has power, a power that will puncture all this talk.  The power of the gospel of Christ crucified, presented in a cruciform way, by the apostle whose ministry is shaped by the cross.

Here's what I wrestle with.  In the church as I know it, there's a lot of talk.  But there's not a lot of power.  And the temptation is to try to substitute more talk for what's missing.  The more we feel the gap between the NT description of the Christian life and our own experience of it, the more we're tempted to talk up the Christian life.  Papering over the weakness of our experience of the Spirit with words.  But that's not the kingdom of God.

Praying this morning for genuine power, not to bypass the cross or the weakness or the suffering, but to take the cross and the weakness and the suffering and make them the place where God's power is displayed.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35

At Cowley Church Community, we've just finished a little series in 1 Corinthians 12-14.  I wrapped up yesterday with 14:26-40, which is mostly about orderly worship.  But there are a couple of verses there (34-35), really quite detached from the main flow of the argument, which express the fairly controversial (!) suggestion that women should remain silent in church.  As if in mockery of my previous post, I found it impossible to preach these verses with precision.  So, here is an attempt to write up what I should have said yesterday, with apologies to the congregation which had to put up with my verbal faffing around the point.

Firstly, it's worth saying that part of the difficulty comes from the almost unique textual problems around these verses.  Many commentators have concluded that they aren't original, and there are strong arguments for their rejection: in one manuscript family they appear after our verse 40, which is hard to explain if they're original; read at face value, they flatly contradict what Paul has already said in chapter 11; and the subject matter interrupts Paul's discussion of prophecy and tongues, to which he returns in v36.  I feel that on balance these arguments are not conclusive.  Although the idea that these verses were added later would make sense of the way they move about in the manuscripts, it doesn't explain their universal presence (i.e., although some manuscripts have the verses after v40, no manuscripts omit the verses altogether).  I find Daniel Wallace's suggestion that Paul may have added the verses in the margin of the manuscript himself to be very interesting.  It would explain the manuscript evidence, and it makes sense of the topic: it's related to orderly worship, but not directly related to the aspect of orderly worship that Paul is mainly talking about here.

However - as a preacher, I dislike standing up to expound a text which I feel so unsure about.  I like to be able to say 'this is the word of the Lord' when Scripture is read, and I dislike having to say 'I think this is probably the word of the Lord'.  For your reassurance, I can't think of any other passage that would cause the same difficulty.  For now, let's assume Paul wrote these verses and that we have to deal with them as Scripture.  What do we do with them?

I suggested on Sunday that there are two approaches to these verses which in the end are just too simplistic.  On the one hand, we can just write them off as hopelessly outdated, a product of an earlier sexist age which we have now transcended.  Then we can just ignore them.  The problem is, it's not just these verses.  I know there are people, including some outstanding theologians, who disagree, but speaking for myself I cannot see any way to make the Bible's presentation of gender anything other than sexist in the eyes of our culture.  We'd have to be prepared to edit Scripture from front to back to get a version of gender that was acceptable - and the way things are going, we might have to re-edit every couple of years to keep up with the changing zeitgeist.  Nor would this be tinkering around the edges.  Obviously in some places (e.g. Ephesians 5), but implicitly throughout, gender is tied to the creation design of God for humanity and ultimately to the gospel.  We need to be careful that our reaction to the apparently unacceptable sayings of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 isn't to throw off the whole of God's revelation.

On the other hand, we could just insist that women be silent in church.  That is to say, we could take the command at face value and enforce it.  This is also easy, in its way.  Of course it will make us unpopular in the surrounding culture, but there is a certain ease to being an odd sect: strong identity markers, confident in the knowledge that we know what is right and everyone else is on the outside.  This would be, in its own way, easy, but I think it would be wrong.  We need to think about what the apostle Paul is doing when he writes his letters.  He isn't handing down isolated and arbitrary commands, but is thinking through the implications of the gospel for his readers.  He is doing theology.  So if Paul wrote this, it is reasonable to ask why, and to seek out his logic.  The difficulty here is that the logic is not obvious.  Nor is it obvious how we can reconcile it with chapter 11.

So what is to be done?

I think we have to take a step back and recognise a number of things. 

We have to recognise that we want these verses to go away, and that there are several different reasons for that.  We want them to go away because they are embarrassing in the face of our culture.  We want them to go away because we fear (rightly) that they can be used in oppressive ways, and indeed we suspect they may have been written to be used in those ways!  We want them to go away because they seem to contradict other passages of Scripture.  We want them to go away because, in our experience, there are women who appear to be gifted to speak in church.  Recognising that we have many motives, some noble and some not so much, to get rid of these verses, we should probably be cautious about actually doing so.  If they cause us difficulty, we should probably wrestle with that rather than just dispose of the difficulty.

We have to recognise that whilst we may not be able to easily make sense of these verses, they are not the only verses on the subject.  There is a whole Biblical exploration of the concept of gender, starting in Genesis 1 and proceeding to the marriage supper of the Lamb.  I am convinced that the overall picture is of difference and complementarity between men and women, and I am convinced that the various restrictions on the roles of women in the churches in the writings of Paul are part of that picture.  Recognising that doesn't make it straightforward to work out what our practice ought to be, but it does give the appropriate context for thinking these things through.

For what it's worth, I'm a sort of 'soft complementarian'.  That is to say, I think Scripture does teach that men and women are different and that this should be reflected in family life and church family life - but I don't think Scripture provides hard and fast rules for how those differences should show up.  I think in the Bible itself the expression of complementarity changes over time.  I think it's a mistake to try to draw up lists of essentially 'male' and 'female' attributes or roles; rather, I think complementarity is a dynamic thing, expressed differently in different cultures.  Having said that, I think the suppression or denial of these differences and their expression is part and parcel of a culture in flight from reality and subject to serious decline.  All in all, I'm happy with the line we've adopted at CCC: elders are all male, because of their role in the church family, but under that headship we want to encourage women to be involved in all aspects of ministry.

Finally, we have to recognise that unless we go for one of the easy answers, we are going to have to do a lot of bearing with one another in love.  On Sunday I used the language of 'fudge' - that was a mistake.  We're not fudging anything.  We're seeking to be faithful to God's word as we understand it, and we need to recognise that in this area as in many others that is not as straightforward as 'read and obey'.  In our seeking to be faithful, we need to recognise that we could be wrong in some of our applications of God's truth - or indeed, that there might be multiple ways of being faithful in a given context.  We should, of course, try to show each other from Scripture where we think we're going wrong - but primarily we should be loving one another.  I think the recognition that it is complicated helps here!  We can give one another more leeway where interpretation and application are difficult.

Where does that leave us on 1 Corinthians 14:34-35?  Let's be frank: we're not going to silence women in the church, and for some that will look like disobedience.  If they're right, God have mercy on us.  I don't think they are right.  But I hope we will receive verses like this - even if we can't see how they should be applied to us directly - as brakes to prevent us from easily accepting our own culture's view of things.  Because they are hard, and at first glance offensive, they make us stop and think about the broader Biblical picture, and about our own practice.  And in that way they serve us, they open us up with their sharp jagged edges to the full spectrum of Scriptural critique and teaching.  In that sense, I hope we can get something from them.

Owen on Spiritual gifts

Prepping for a sermon series in 1 Corinthians 12-14, I've been re-reading John Owen on the gifts of the Spirit (end of volume 4 of his Works, if you're interested).  There's lots of good stuff in there, but there are some big negatives which are interesting in and of themselves.  It can be instructive to see, at a few centuries' remove, the errors made by theologians, and to think how these ideas might have had an impact on the course of church history!

Here are the two biggest problems with Owen's account of spiritual gifts:

1.  He ties gifting almost exclusively to the ordained ministry.  Although there are occasional hints that the Spirit gives gifts to the average layman, Owen has almost no interest in those gifts.  He sees Spiritual gifting and ecclesiastical office as almost completely correlated.  This has some definite positive effects: he is pretty damning when it comes to the appointment of persons not clearly gifted for Christian ministry to ecclesiastical office.  Without the gifting of the Spirit, nobody can be legitimately appointed to a church office, no matter what human calling they receive, and the human attempt to construct a ministry independent of the Spirit's equipping represents a revolt against the authority of Christ.  But negatively, where is the body?  Where is every-member ministry?

I think we can trace this problem to Owen's historical situation.  The Magisterial Reformation never did quite escape the clericalism of the mediæval period.  Moreover, Owen was concerned, in the face of various groups of 'enthusiasts', for the maintenance of order in the church - a concern which he read from 1 Corinthians.  But for the 17th century Englishman, order meant constitutional order, and that meant officers.  One wonders how the over-reliance on church officers which this view implies has affected church life in the English speaking world for the last 300 years.

2.  He doesn't think the church is on mission.  That might be stating it too baldly, but one of Owen's arguments for the cessation of the 'extraordinary' gifts (prophecy, healings, miracles, tongues etc.) and some of the 'extraordinary' offices (prophets and evangelists) is that they were necessary during the initial period of mission, when the gospel was new to the world and much opposed.  When the churches are planted, there is no more need for such things.  The regular work of the ministry is upbuilding within the church, not mission.  The churches, being established, have in the Word written and preached by Spirit-empowered ministers everything that they need to maintain (and if lost, recover) their identity and life in Christ.  There is no need for miracles anymore.

Owen had other reasons for cessationism, but this one at least will hardly stand up to scrutiny.  The church, in so far as it is true to its given identity according to the witness of the NT, is always being sent.  One could say it is always being established.  The gospel is always new to the world, even if the world has been hearing it for centuries.  Even if the whole population of the world were nominally Christian, the church would still be sent by her Lord - would still be on mission.  I wonder how the loss of this perspective contributed to the inner weakness of the churches and their vulnerability to a rising secularism.

Christ, the Firstfruits

In 1 Corinthians 15 the Apostle Paul engages a fairly fundamental problem in the church in Corinth: some of the Christians are saying that there is no resurrection of the dead.  It appears they are not questioning the resurrection of Christ, because Paul's counter-argument is to point out that if there is no resurrection of the dead then Christ himself is not raised.  And if Christ is not raised, the apostolic preaching is a lie, and the faith of the Corinthian Christians is a sham.

For Paul's argument to work, the Corinthian Christians have to accept the resurrection of Jesus.  So what are they denying?  Presumably they are denying what might be called the general resurrection.  Although Christ was raised, they do not expect themselves to be raised, at least not bodily.  Bodily resurrection would have been distasteful to Hellenistic culture anyway.  So Paul's argument is: if no general resurrection - if no last day on which all are raised, to life or judgement - then no particular resurrection of Christ; but Christ is raised, therefore we look to the resurrection of all.

Apologetically, Paul makes it clear that everything hinges on the fact that Christ is raised from the dead, and the evidence for this is the testimony of the many who saw him alive (including 500 at once, most of whom are still alive when Paul is writing, and can therefore be consulted; also, of course, including Paul himself).

What particularly strikes me today about this passage is what Paul assumes the resurrection of Christ to be.  What does he think has happened?

Paul believed in and looked for the resurrection of the dead before he ever met Jesus.  Like Martha, he expected the resurrection of the just at the last day.  This was part of his Jewish heritage, part of the Scriptural testimony which he had absorbed from youth.  Paul didn't need the resurrection of Jesus to persuade him of the general resurrection.

But also like Martha, Paul has been brought face-to-face with the fact that Jesus is the resurrection.  The last day - the resurrection of the just - has in some sense already come.  Christ is the first of all those who will rise.  That is why Paul says that if there is no (general) resurrection then Christ himself has not been raised.  The resurrection of Jesus is the general resurrection.  In him, the future hope of a faithful Jew like Paul has been brought into the present.  The age to come, quite simply, has come.

That is not to say that the age to come is not still in the future.  Christ is the firstfruits, and the guarantee that the rest will follow.  But something truly dramatic has happened in the resurrection of Christ.  In our individualistic way, we tend to think of the resurrection of Jesus as one thing, and my resurrection to come as another.  But for Paul, the future resurrection of all is so closely linked to the resurrection of Christ that one without the other is unthinkable.  They are in principle the same event, the general resurrection so wrapped up in the person of Christ that they can't be separated.

It's a new day.  He is risen, we will rise.

Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

Why I am so stupid

There is no getting around the fact that we Christians believe all manner of stupid things.  Here is a sample of really dumb things that I believe to be absolutely true:  I believe that as I type this I may well be observed by invisible spiritual beings, some good and some evil; I believe that the world outside me exists purely for the sake of one Man; I believe that the death of one Person has completely changed the situation of every single person who has ever existed; I believe that a dead Man came back to life on the third day; I believe that the most glorious thing that can happen to a person is to die because of their faith.  And when I say 'believe', don't hear that as some sort of religious word.  I mean that I believe these things in much the same way that I believe that my laptop is in front of me as I type.

These things are stupid things to believe.

They are not stupid beliefs in and of themselves.  Only internally contradictory beliefs would be stupid in isolation.  They are dumb beliefs because they are impossible to fit within the frame of reference which we use to describe reality.  They are stupid because they are contradicted by the most fundamental axioms which we have adopted as arbiters of truth.  In particular, they are dumb because they are manifestly not derived from my experience or from any empirical judgement.  They are stupid, actually, because they could only work in our frame of reference as 'values', as myths which are in some sense true for me but certainly do not make any claim to actual, real-world truthfulness.

I believe all these stupid things.

I believe them because I have come to think that our frame of reference is all wrong.  I believe them because I think they reflect a higher frame of reference: the truth of the Creator.  These foolish beliefs are his folly, not mine. And his folly is wiser than my wisdom.

There is just one thing I am determined to do: to keep being stupid.  The danger is that I take these beliefs, see the profundity of them, glimpse something of God's wisdom - and adopt a position of superiority.  If I do this, I deny the very reality of the beliefs I profess; shape them into something strong and praise-worthy.

No, I will just carry on being dumb.  Nothing much ever depended on my cleverness anyway.

Being wise

Christians often pray that God would give them wisdom, and it's right that we should do so.  Most often we pray that God would make us wise in a particular decision.  Again, perfectly correct.  It's just an acknowledgement that God is involved in, and indeed sovereign over, the decision-making process, and that the outcome is in his hands.

Still, I do sometimes feel like we're not really asking for wisdom, but just for the answer.  Do we want God to make us wise, or just to have him point us in the right direction for this particular decision?  Sometimes wisdom is not much more to Christians than sanctified common sense, sanctified clear-headedness, or even just sanctified 'getting it right'.  To put it another way, wisdom is all about the process and the decision; it has no content of its own, it is just the way to get to the right outcome.

In Scripture, wisdom has content.  In the Old Testament, wisdom begins with the fear of YHWH (Ps 111:10, Prov 1:7), and works itself out in devotion to his law (Deut 4:6).  That is why wisdom is a tree of life, and why such exorbitant promises are attached to the pursuit of wisdom.  To be wise in the OT is not really to have a canny sense of what to do in a given situation, or to leap to the right conclusion.  To be wise is to know God, to fear God, to study God's ways.  Wisdom has a shape.  It is about following God, perceiving his work and way and conforming our lives to his revelation.  Wisdom is often linked to creation (e.g. Ps 104:24), because the Scriptural authors saw in God's creation his way of working, and sought to follow it.

In the New Testament, the content of wisdom is filled out with a personal name: Jesus.  It is Jesus who is the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:30), and in him that all the treasures of divine wisdom are to be found (Col 2:3).  Wisdom is knowing God through Jesus.  In Jesus Christ, we see how it is that God works, and so in continuity with the OT, we are encouraged to get on board with God's actions, methods, activities.  Wisdom is something that we can learn from Jesus.

The hard part is that this wisdom is particularly the wisdom of Christ crucified.  God works through the cross of Christ, through the crucified Jesus.  That is why in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 Paul is insistent that wisdom will not look wise.  Wisdom will look foolish, because it hinges on crucifixion.  Paul rejects the wisdom of the world, which moves easily from here to there, from where we are to where we want to be, in favour of the wisdom of God, which he reads in the cross of Christ.  Far from being sanctified common sense, this is senseless and foolish from a human perspective, but it is nevertheless divine wisdom.  It is the way God has gone, which means it is the way things work, which means it is the way we ought to walk.

In practice, I think this means that when we pray for wisdom we should first of all seek the answers to our prayers at the cross of Jesus.  In making this decision, which outcome looks cross-shaped - which outcome looks like dying to live?  Which outcome looks like the humanly-foolish, divinely-wise action of the cross?  I think that will often mean running precisely contrary to common sense.  In life, if something is going well, we continue it; the cross may mean giving that thing up to death for eternal gain.  In church, we often assume that growth or success should be continued - if we're growing, let's plan for growth!  But where is the cross?  How do our decisions reflect the Calvary road?

Wisdom is cross shaped, which means it often will cut across what seems good to us.  It often will look foolish.  But Jesus Christ, and him crucified, has become to us wisdom from God.  We should follow him.

Love and Security

If it is true that perfect love drives out fear (and the Scripture cannot be broken!) then I am sure it is also the case that lingering fear drives out love.

This is a fairly obvious reflection on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. So much unloving behaviour flows from my felt need to protect myself and my own reputation. I need to look out for number one - how can I possibly have time for being loving? Even resentment or irritability can be traced back to fear about my own identity or the way others perceive me. By reckoning up the wrongs others have done me and meditating on them - which is resentment - I am really just reinforcing my sense of having been in the right myself. By reacting instantly with anger to the slightest crossing of my own will - which is irritability - I reinforce my sense of being at the centre of the universe.

I would need to be so secure, so totally certain that I didn't need to look out for myself, to love in the way the Scripture demands. I would need to really believe that my identity is secure in Christ. I would need to be sure that God sees me truly and loves me unconditionally.

It reminds me a bit of Luther. Luther argued that mediaeval Catholicism had got people so busy chasing after their own justification that they were not able to love others. The money that should have gone to the poor went on indulgences; time that should have been devoted to service of others was wasted in pilgrimages. The Church had people so busy chasing righteousness that they didn't have time to be righteous! If justification were given by grace, on the other hand, and received only by faith - why, then people could be free to live a life of love.