In thinking about how people love “quick and easy” Bible study, as we discussed yesterday, it’s easy to see how an anti-intellectual spirit can grow in our churches.
Joe Churchmember reads “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” (1 Thessalonians 5:22), and he can understand it: don’t do anything that looks bad. Then new preacher Dr. McSmartypants comes in and says that passage is talking about testing the spirits (holding onto what’s good, avoiding every form of evil) and Joe Churchmember feels like Dr. McSmartypants is taking a simple passage and making it confusing. He may even say, “I shouldn’t have to have a college degree to understand your sermons!” [Interesting note: my spell checker flags “Churchmember” but not “McSmartypants”]
I think that also explains the popularity of topical preaching. In a topical sermon, the preacher can string together “easy” verses, not having to wrestle with context, culture, linguistics or any of those other things. He can say, “We put money in the collection plate EVERY Sunday because 1 Corinthians 16 says ‘Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him'”, and the whole congregation will nod in agreement.
When I was in college, one of my friends told of having been rebuked by an older member for not using the King James Version. The reason? “We didn’t lose arguments back when we used the King James.” Says something about the strength of the reasoning behind those arguments.
So how do we convince people to have the patience to do serious Bible study? How do we encourage them to read the Bible, while still saying, “You can’t always take a text at face value”? How do we make the Bible accessible to the masses while maintaining intellectual integrity?
Any suggestions?
Waiting for your response. :)
Darin, you don’t expect me to answer my own questions, do you?
As a teenager, I thought nothing of making a meal out of junk food. As I got older and a little bit wiser, I not only realized that such food never really satisfied my hunger but that it was also unhealthy.
When Christians get tired of trying to feast on spiritual junk food – quick and easy answers, platitudes, proof-texts, and so on – they will start feasting in a spiritually healthy manner, which includes putting in the work to do serious Bible study. This will happen when they witness both the good results in others who feast in spiritual healthy ways and when they witness the disaster of those who feast on spiritual junk food.
Tim,
This is tough and depends on what the aim of the preaching event is verses the aim of Bible study. I preach topically (yet exegetically, I think). The reason is because I don’t think it’s best to do “Bible study” in the sermon. We have other avenues for that and the church needs both.
Sean,
And let me make clear, I think topical preaching has its place. I’m referring to the “lazy man’s” topical preaching, sort of like reading a concordance from the pulpit.
Grace and peace,
Tim
Tim, you know this, but our anti-intellectualism goes way back to Alexander Campbell and B.W. Stone. In the fight against classic liberalism in the early 20th century the gentle slide that began in the mid 19th century became an absolute avalanche. So today it is not just a matter of personal preference, but it is a matter of orthodoxy. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard the “we all know what B.S. stands for, and M.S. stands for more of the same, and Ph.D. stands for piled higher and deeper” joke. I genuinely wish I could share K. Rex Butts’ optimism, but I fear I cannot. On a small scale, individual level perhaps we can. On a large scale, institutional level I think the issue is moot. In order to encourage in-depth, soul-searching Bible study I have to come to grips with the idea that I may be wrong, and that wrong ideas require repentance. We have been proclaiming that “I am right and you are wrong” for so long now that to believe otherwise is heresy.
In my recent screed against our most popular forms of personal evangelism I make the point that if we begin making converts with a boilerplate list of questions or approved proof-texts then the end result will be a convert that is focused on legalistic perfection and not personal discipleship with Jesus. So, perhaps the best place to begin would be our concept of evangelism and how we approach the creation of disciples. But on a meta-level we are going to have to address our fallacious thinking that “Bible study” only involves 30 minutes (at best) of proof-texting the Scriptures one day a week.
I am, along with Darin, awaiting your erudite and no doubt sublime response.
Paul.
Rex –
Will they? Does America’s obesity epidemic support or undermine your idea that eventually, people will get tired of junk food?
I believe that as long as spiritual junk food is available, people will continue to buy it until they have a spiritual heart attack.
While junk food hasn’t gone out of style, though, there has been an explosion of interest in cooking and creating good and beautiful food in the past few years, due to such media as the Food Network and the different chef competition shows. What do these have to tell us?
PASSION will help draw people into deeper, more fulfilling spiritual feeding.
COMMUNITY will help draw people into it. 2 Tim 2:2 doesn’t say much about teaching one person to sit by themselves in a quiet room and study. Those who have been equipped need to equip a GROUP of others so that each of them can go equip a group of others, etc. etc.
Passion, Community, and conveying COMPETENCE – helping other people believe that they CAN study the Bible and that they CAN work through these tangles and challenges for themselves, especially in a group (can you tell that I don’t have any more interest in solo bible study than Peter seems to in 2 Peter 1:20-21?) – these kinds of things have encouraged people to get off the couch and into the kitchen, and combined with the Spirit of God, they will encourage Christians to get off the couch and into the Bible together.
I want to speak a word of defense for our church members for a moment.
Those of us who have been to seminary know soooo much more than the average person in the pew. And we’ve been blessed by it. Like K Rex Butts, I sit at an office with a Greek New Testament, and against all my efforts to the contrary, I can read the danged thing.
People in my church don’t care about that. Maybe they should. They care about their finances, their kids, their jobs, feeling loved and aceepted by God, making God-honoring decisions, etc….
And I wonder if what professor/preacher – types interpret as anti-intellectuallism is our failure to communicate the deep truths of scriptures in compelling and relevant ways; speaking to our church without a “So what…”
I have a simple pedagogical approach: Adults learn on a “need to know basis.” Perhaps we’re teaching a bunch of stuff they don’t need to know, and they know they don’t need to know it. The folks in our churches aren’t stupid. I once knew a business owner who read varaciously and was pretty smart, but when he walked in the church, he wanted everything dumbed-downed. The reason: He felt that preachers made something easy complicated and he had decent reason to think so. We use words no one else uses, we talk and talk and frequesntly have no applicable point. How much time each day do we send simply reading and then deliver a message based on our theological interest rather than what the congregation NEEDS in or to DO the gospel.
My church is made up of some REALLY smart people. None of them are talking about penal substitutionarty atonement vs christus victor. When they deal with those issues, it’s because I communicate the reality and importance of those issues in terms they can understand. It’s my responsibility to be clear and compelling. No where in the scriptures does it say, “Blessed are the studied.”
I think James’ word at the Jerusalem Council are apropos for church leaders, “Why should we make it difficult….”
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
I know of a bunch of church members who have grown tired of spiritual junk food. That does not mean they want to hear a sermon or have a Bible study on the economics of the Trinity or the difference between Luther and Zwingli’s understanding of the body and blood in the Lord’s Supper. What it does mean is that there tired of sermons/Bible study that reduces everything to a simple black and white solution. By way of example, they want to wrestle with what it means to have received the gift of the Holy Spirit and how that changes their relationship with God in everything from assurance of salvation to prayer to daily living because they love Jesus yet find it a challenge to follow Jesus.
The great thing is that the farther I am removed from my seminary days, the easier it is to preach and teach without sounding like I’ve been incubating inside a seminary.
Some of the worst anti-intellectualism I have seen is in academia, especially places like Yale Univeristy (I served at a church in New Haven across the street from Yale for 5 yewares in the ’90s). They just cannot even begin to see or grasp ANYTHING if it is not directly tied to either race, gender or class struggle. But that’s another topic.
On this topic, when uneducated people know they are respected for the wisdom (in all its various forms) they do have, it is amazing how open they are to learning more from a whipper-snapper.
* Ooops: “years…”
I too would stand up for church members. There are many who have more wisdom regarding God’s Word than do those who can quote the Greek text of Romans from memory. It doesn’t require a college degree to be someone for whom the Word of God comes alive.
But there are a large number of people in this world who want the Bible delivered in the form of Hallmark cards, cute sayings that they can remember during the week. They want to quote “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” without wrestling with what Paul was saying there, that he wasn’t offering a bit of Zig Ziglar motivation, he was saying that Christ gave him the power to accept poverty and to accept abundance. They want “where 2 or 3 are gathered” without the messiness of church discipline.
It’s the motivation that leads us to develop 5 steps to salvation, 5 acts of worship and Prayer of Jabez theology. Don’t make me wrestle through the imitation of Christ; give me 10 easy steps for fixing my marriage. Don’t talk to me about prayer and fasting; give me practical tips for getting ahead in business.
I’m not advocating the preaching of obscure theological points. I am advocating teaching people to engage the text on a deeper-than-surface level, learning to apply themselves to the Bible rather than insisting that the Bible be applicable to them. Instead of asking how to make the Bible fit people’s world, we need to show people how to be transformed into what the Bible calls them to be.
Grace and peace,
Tim
The real issues, Tim is what people think a chuch is and what it is for. As you know, I reject the 5 points, 3 thoughts, etc…approach. I’m always looking for a happy marriage between scholarship and accessibility. It’s a difficult balance to get.
I think this is why Jesus’ use of story is so great. He embeds depth in forms that are accessible.
Accessible to whom? The disciples certainly didn’t find it accessible. They didn’t stick with him in John 6 because his *teaching* was accessible.
I don’t suppose you’re arguing for inaccessibility, Nick. For one, because the disciples didn’t understand everything doesn’t mean they didn’t understand anything. I suppose of that were the case, none of us would be Christians. They clearly understood – had access to – a significant portion of what Jesus taught.
There is also a key distinction. The disciples did have access. To Jesus. What we are doing in preaching a teaching is trying to provide access to the same. Is there something beneficial to obscurity? I know of no one nowhere who doesn’t know what a story is. How to hear a story and interpret it. The form is accessible, regardless to whether to complete message is.
Heck, when I watch reruns of shows I’ve seen, I catch something new, but I did understand basics of the story the first time.
No, I’m not arguing for inaccessibility – I’m arguing for presenting the story of God, as much as possible, in the same mysterious way He does.
I know tons of people who, while they know what a story is, have great difficulty interpreting them.
That’s why the parable of the talents gets watered down to a story about giving your time, talents, and treasures to the church – rather than a story about the One True God coming to Jerusalem in judgment.
Part of the point of teaching in parables, Jesus draw from Isaiah in order to say, was precisely the opportunity to be somewhat obscure. If everyone everywhere knew how to hear and interpret stories well, you preachers would be out of business.
If only that day would come, Nick, if only….
In his brilliance, God created birds and eggs in such a way that baby birds need the exercise of breaking through, for themselves, the inaccessibility-to-the-world provided by their eggshell, in order to develop the strength to persevere in the larger world into which they’re being born. Without the struggle to get out, the chick’s physiology fails to develop adequately and they usually die relatively quickly.
That’s one of my concerns with turning the Story of God into a pithy, fluffy-cloud, boardbook of accessibility.
The other is, who says that my work of trying to make the story accessible doesn’t actually obscure even more important parts? I’m sure the Fathers thought that allegory was a brilliant interpretive tool for making the Scriptures accessible – in some ways they were correct but in many, many others they obscured serious and important parts of the story with their allegorizing accessibility.
Making things more obscure than they are is certainly foolish; but we have the Message the way we have it for a reason. Let’s respect that, rather than reshaping it, polishing the dirty parts, grinding off the rough edges, in order to make it more accessible.
The only way for people to be transformed by the Bible is to read the Bible. That sounds simplistic, but it’s really not. For most people, reading the Bible is about hopping from verse to verse, or story to story, looking for whatever validates the point they’re trying to make. And most Bible reading programs are worse: is there any approach better guaranteed to turn people off reading their Bibles than starting at Genesis and reading three chapters a day until they get throughout Revelation?
I encourage people to read a book at a time and to consider the flow based on the genre of the book. If it’s a gospel, what do the stories and teachings tell us about Jesus and the people with whom he interacted? If it’s an epistle, what’s the flow of the argument that’s being made? How do the “practical” instructions given by Paul in the latter half of his letters connect to the “theological” content of the first half of his letters? If it’s a history, what are we learning about the way people are and the way God responds to that?
When you apply that approach to, say, Acts, you see the church forming and changing as it spreads among various cultures. You see how the leaders of the church deal with the various problems that accompany growth. You see the focus of the gospel message isn’t on us and our sin, but on Jesus as Lord and our response to him. More important is what you don’t see: you don’t see acts of worship or a plan of salvation.
Here’s the kicker: when people start to read the Bible that way, when they see how rich it is, how interesting the stories (and even the commandments) are, they want to know more. They want to dig deeper. They want to know why certain metaphors are used, or why Paul preaches differently in Turkey than he does in Greece. They want to know who the Stoics and Epicureans are and why that matters.
What holds many people back is a poor choice of translation (I love the KJV, but, for a generation of near-functional illiterates, it’s not a good choice to gain understanding) and not knowing how to read the Bible as it should be (listen to how people read it out loud: verse by verse). The Biblica folks have come out with an edition of the New Testament with no chapter or verse markings and a more logical arrangement of books. While the translation is not one of my favorites (TNIV), it makes the material much more approachable. By treating the text like a standard book, it encourages people to read it like a standard book. Once we get people reading the text, the power of what’s written will hook them: they’ll want to drink deeper.
I once had an older preacher remind me that not all fruit needs to be hung low…but not all fruit needs to be held high.
The piece-meal approach we bring to the Bible, especially in topical preaching, almost guarantees that people do not see a developing story-line from Genesis through the end of the Bible (Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained).
Plus, the way we have treated the Old Testament is almost heretical. We certainly do not get what Paul says in Romans 15:4 – that the OT is for our learning “that we through the comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” With hope in short-supply among our people (except in statements such as, “Well I don’t know, but I sure hope I get to heaven!”), we need to be finding more ways to give hope. One of the surest I know is in the OT presentation of God as a faithful, covenant-keeping God.
Not knowing the Bible story except in isolated, unconnected segments and not knowing the God of the Bible as revealed in the Old Testament, our people do not have strong incentives to dig more deeply.
Ok – I admit it – I walk among the less intellectual. If fact – I think they walk a little (make that a lot) further ahead of me than I would truly admit. I am not a read and comprehend type but more of a read and sleep. That is why I love you guys so much. The words I read come alive once the Sunday morning bible study has started. The words I read come to comprehensible measure as I hear the sermons.
To make note – some of us people (or should I say – some of us brothers and sisters bought by the blood of the Messiah) do not read to well, nor study well. We were not blessed with a mind that works. We were blessed with work alone. And that’s the blessing – even I, a man barely passed high school, who will most likely not retire, but will work to the end or retire very poor, who does not understand what he reads (reminds of a bible story), can understand the Paradise Regained through Him who loves. All because of people (brothers and sisters) who can read and understand. God bless you and read on, understand, and teach us who need a little help.
Ed,
I appreciate the perspective, though I think you sell yourself a bit short. The encouragement is much appreciated.
Grace and peace,
Tim
Ed –
One friend of mine has suggested, in line with your thoughts, that there are three types of Christians:
Head Christians – who relate to God best by reading and thinking and the disciplines of the mind;
Hands Christians – who relate to God best through work and service and the disciplines of sharing and sacrifice; and
Heart Christians – who relate to God best through prayer and meditation and the disciplines of quiet devotion.
The church is made up of people who possess all three characteristics in differing measures – all of us need all three aspects in our lives – but our Christian world needs to be a place that fosters growth in each aspect and invites and encourages participation – not just from Head Christians but from those in whom one of the other aspects is dominant as well.
Sean wrote:
Why is textual preaching so radically different from ‘Bible study’ that you prefer not to do it in a sermon?
My preference for textual preaching (which can take many forms, depending on the nature of the text and the sermon) comes because it drives me into the text in context – which topical preaching does not always do. Many (not necessarily Sean) prefer topical preaching because they get to set the agenda for the preaching event. When We chose the topics and also chose the texts to make the points We want to make, We (at least some of us some of the time) present our thinking on the topic instead of God’s thinking.
Textual preaching does not eliminate this entirely – but at least we deal more directly with what God has spoken than when we choose topical presentations – especially those who tend to wrest texts from contexts to make a point.