God Looks on the Heart 3

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This line of thought leads us to the question of absolute truth.  Does the pragmatic, Wesleyan tradition believe in absolute truth?  Do you mean, do we believe in truth, definite truths?  Well, of course.  What's the point of trying to communicate if there is no such thing as truth?

The question is more about how accurate or precise our systems of thought are.  The great thing about systematizing our thoughts is that it helps us process things.  Systems of thought help us grasp complex things and remember them.  Systems of thought help us see potential inconsistencies in the way we think.

Other traditions today have a clear penchant toward what we might call the Platonic.  Plato thought that truth was a matter of ideas and that the things we see around us are only imperfect shadows of the truths we can only access with our minds.  So many Christians who use code words like "worldview" have a tendency to think that everything we see and do around us is simply the outworking of some system of ideas in our heads. They might spend a great deal of time trying to get your ideas straight, thinking that if we can only get the system of ideas in your head right, then the rest--how you live--will take care of itself.

This way of thinking has a lot of problems.  For one, the vast majority of people do not live from day to day playing out their ideas.  The sentiment that "right insight leads to right action" sounds noble, and is a great ideal toward which to aspire. [1]  It just is not how most of us will ever operate.  Most people will change sooner if they work with God's help to change their habits, their physical actions.  According to most psychologists, this path is actually more effective in changing the way people think.  So the "get the ideas straight and the actions will follow" only proves to be true for a small number of us.  For most of us, the pattern is "get the habits straight and the ideas will follow."

Indeed, the Bible itself does not lay out some neat system of ideas.  It is deeply ironic on the highest level that the vast majority of biblical texts are not theoretical, but contextual.  Romans is not a "compendium of systematic theology," as Luther's systematizer, Melanchthon, once said.  Romans is more systematic than Paul's other letters, but its argument and train of thought still have everything to do with a situation where Paul is introducing himself to a group that might potentially have heard bad things of him from his opponents.  If one wants to complain about Wesley writing sermons rather than a systematic theology, one might first start by complaining about the apostle Paul and, indeed, every book in the Bible.

So we see that the idea of a "biblical worldview," as helpful as it can be, has as much or more to do with the Christian thinkers who "find" it in the Bible as it does with the Bible itself.  The briefest look at how many different systems of thinking Christians have put together over the centuries shows this dynamic very quickly.  Since none of the books of the Bible themselves present a system of thought, such systems require not a little glue from those who construct them.  Such glue, thankfully, usually comes from a hefty dose of common Christian tradition--glue that the Holy Spirit has helped the Christians of the ages apply to the biblical texts.  But of course individual thinkers also are bound to mistake their own personalities and the perspectives of their situations for "Scripture alone."

This is not the place to unpack what really is involved in determining what "the Bible says."  First we have the meanings of individual texts, which we have no choice but to define according to the definitions and categories we know.  Even on this smallest of levels we are more likely to find meanings familiar to us rather than those of the original audiences to whom the biblical texts were literally written.  Then there is the matter of how we connect individual texts together.  Since they usually do not tell us how to fit them together, this is a process we must do.  We have no other choice.

So we prioritize them in terms of the meanings we have already given them.  We designate texts familiar to us as "clear" and those that seem strange to us as "unclear."  If the first meaning that suggests itself to us does not make sense to us or does not fit with our sense of what the Bible can say, we might reinterpret its meaning as best we can.  I am assuming throughout these last few paragraphs that the reader in question sincerely wants to hear what God has to say and submits to God's authority in Scripture.

The notion of "biblical worldview" as often as not leads a person to run roughshod over the biblical text.  It is one thing to find common themes throughout the Bible.  Love of God and neighbor, for example, pops up continually throughout the biblical texts.  It is another to mistake a Christian system of thinking for what the biblical texts themselves actually say.

For one thing, such systems usually undersell God's brilliance. When I think of how to illustrate what I mean, science often comes to mind.  If a person takes a high school or college science class, we often learn simple rules to start off.  We learn that objects fall at the same rate, no matter how heavy they are.  We learn that it takes so long to get across a certain distance moving at a certain speed.

But if we stay with science long enough, things get complicated.  Those things falling--we talked about them as points because in reality, air and wind get in the way.  Those things getting from A to B in a certain time--we learn that time slows down as an object approaches the speed of light.  Indeed, a lot of "real life" calculations require what are called statistical models.  Scientists see how most things behave because reality is too complicated to come up with a neat equation or rule to describe the situation.

Similarly, I am convinced that those of us who think we have neat little systems of theology to describe the truth of the Bible--let alone God--are going to be incredibly embarrassed in the kingdom of God.  The problem with systems of theology, in my opinion, is that I can understand them.  I do not think I would be able to understand God, at least not on a literal level.  After all, I have trouble understanding Einstein's theory of relativity.  Surely God is a bit more advanced still!  Surely his revelation to us is baby talk, "goo-goo ga-ga" that I can just get the gist of, even if I really am only getting the general impression.

The bottom line here is that I revel in the fact that God looks on the heart.  I have to think that those who are more oriented around the head are going to be very embarrassed for the first few moments of the kingdom.  And after all, if God is primarily interested in our heads, why does he not set us all straight?  We know each other too well to think that all the most spiritual people are Wesleyans or Baptists or Lutherans or Catholics or Reformed or Quakers.  There are equally spiritual, equally open, equally intelligent individuals in all denominations.  Correcting the finer points of our ideas just does not seem to be high on God's agenda.

And look at how long God took to send Christ.  Even those whose interpretation of Genesis leads them to believe in a young earth see God waiting thousands of years before Christ came, and even the staunchest Protestant will have to deal with God waiting over a thousand years to send Martin Luther to get things back on track.  Other Christians will see God waiting millions or even billions of years just to bring humanity into the world, let alone to redeem us!

In short, no likely understanding of God sees correcting our understanding as God's first order of business. God just has not moved that quickly in history.  And thus it is that while ideas matter to Wesleyans, the state of your heart and the state of your life are much more important.  Are you a Seventh-Day Adventist who worships on Saturday, believes our souls sleep before the resurrection, and maybe even stays away from pork?  Wesleyans would join almost all other Christians in thinking you probably have emphasized the wrong biblical passages.  But as Wesley said, "if your heart is as my heart... then put your hand in mine." [2]

[1] Plato's reporting of Socrates' philosophy.

[2] From his sermon, "On a Catholic Spirit."