On Mondays, I'm writing on my journey with Scripture in college, seminary and beyond. I jumped the gun last week with the King James Version, missed a step. Backtracking this week to 1987. Previous posts at the bottom.
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1. There are three key pivot points in my spiritual pilgrimage. I've already mentioned one. It was an afternoon when I was ten years old at a February camp meeting when my conscience suddenly awakened. A period of about ten years of terror began when I struggled to find peace despite constantly praying for it. [1]
The second major pivot point in my spiritual journey happened on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1987. This was about a year after a relationship had fallen apart because of my self-doubt. Questions about the "standards" I have discussed was one of the symptoms. The woman I had dated returned to normal dress after the relationship ended.
While dress standards had been around me growing up, my parents had not emphasized them, so I'm not sure that they had really been very important to me before I went to college. As a man, I wasn't too restricted. It was more of something to which I assented. So now that it was personal, I couldn't see the meaning in them. Many of the rules of my context didn't make sense to me (like no dancing) even though I had no trouble keeping them.
2. In retrospect, I wonder if my moral development was also working in the background. I totally agree with Søren Kierkegaard, Lawrence Kohlberg, and others that blind rule-keeping is a lower stage of moral thinking. In duty-oriented ethics, rules don't necessarily have to have meaning. Their meaning is in the fact that they are rules.
This is where legalism can come in -- morality can simply become a checklist to do or not do. The rules become the goal rather than the meaning of the rules. In the hands of some personalities, we multiply rules because we like rules. We like structure. We like certainty. Although our understanding of the Pharisees is often a caricature, we know them especially for their penchant to reduce God's expectations to rules, subrules, sub-subrules, etc.
I had what I thought was a revealing conversation with my dad some time after I returned from my studies in England. I don't know what issue we were specifically discussing, but he finally exclaimed, "What don't you do?" (There were many answers I could have given him -- I don't murder, I don't steal). I'm sure we were talking about something that our branch of Wesleyanism didn't do that I now didn't have a moral problem with. Don't get me wrong -- my dad was a compassionate, reasonable man.
But it revealed that my father's church culture had programmed him to see morality primarily in terms of do's and don'ts. It was a hyper-duty based ethic. I wonder how many American Christians -- especially evangelicals -- think this way. It is a "law and order" mentality. It thrives on clarity, certainty, and concreteness. It requires less wrestling with the complexity of life or motives. Rather, it's thinking is, "This is the rule. Did you break it."
3. On Easter morning 1987, I felt compelled for some reason to read through the book of Galatians. I don't think I had ever done something like that. I read through a whole book of the Bible in one sitting -- in the atomized King James Version, no less.
As I read, I felt the Spirit telling me that I aligned far more with the Judaizers that Paul was fighting against than with Paul. (I should add, I had a very old perspective understanding of Paul at this time.) Paul was telling the Galatians that a right standing with God was a gift. It wasn't something you could earn by being good enough. God was looking for faith in Christ not works of law.
Galatians 5:2: "Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing."
Interesting that it was considered important in my circles to have male children circumcised. This was part of our hermeneutic that didn't really differentiate the Old Testament from the New Testament. You applied it all equally (inconsistently). So even though Paul tells the Galatians not to get circumcised, we did it because the Israelites did, and somehow we read the Old Testament as if we were Israelites too.
Galatians 4:9-11: "Now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain."
Paul was not telling the Galatians that they needed to shape up and start keeping the Old Testament rules. He was, in effect, arguing for a heart-oriented approach. He was telling them they did not have to keep certain Old Testament rules. (I would now say the Israel-specific ones like circumcision, food laws, and sabbath observance.)
I would now categorize Paul's ethic (and Jesus') as a "virtue-based" ethic. It is an approach that says, "When your heart is right, your actions will be on the right track as well." It is a movement from who we are as Spirit-filled believers (being) to right action (doing). For sure, our ignorance can cause some malfunction in this process. But in theory, if we are led by the Spirit, we will walk by the Spirit (Gal. 5:16).
4. There was at that time a student on the campus of Central Wesleyan College (where I went to college), the daughter of a professor, who was perhaps the most Spirit-filled person I knew at the time. She had recently gotten back on track with her faith, and she exuded a contagious love for the Lord. As I reflected on Galatians, it occurred to me that here was someone who was far closer to the Lord than I was, and yet she didn't keep any of the rules I grew up with.
She had very short hair, for example. When one of my aunts cut her hair short, members of my family said she had "backed up on light," which meant that she had known better and chosen to rebel against God. This girl on campus wore jeans. She had earrings. And yet she clearly was filled with the Spirit.
In that sense, Galatians 5:22 was convicting. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." That sure didn't seem like a good description of most of the "entirely sanctified" holiness people I grew up with. [2] Me? Peace? Ha!!
Joy? That's not how I perceived them. "Love"? No, I can't say that that's the first word that came to me. "Peace," "kindness," "gentleness"? No, not really. Curmudgeon would have more been my impression. "Self-control" -- yes!! In gobs.
It would increasingly seem to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with my previous paradigm when the key indicators of the Spirit seemed to be absent in those in my world who most emphasized the Spirit. Those who most believed in entire sanctification seemed to me the least to fit the checklist.
5. That Easter Sunday was a turning point. It wasn't that the change would have been immediately noticeable. I kept keeping the "holiness" rules. Like I said, the holiness rules didn't really affect men very much anyway.
But you might call it a Protestant moment. Back to the Bible. I was re-orienting myself around Scripture in a new way. Now the question was, "What does Scripture actually say?" rather than "How can I interpret this verse in a way that agrees with my tradition?"
The scientific thinking that had developed in high school and that I had pursued initially as a chemistry major at CWC came into play. [3] Gather evidence from Scripture. Form hypotheses about what it might mean. Test the hypothesis against the text. Refine your conclusion. It is basically the inductive Bible study method that I would learn at Asbury Seminary the next year.
A note of caution. It is a dangerous thing to be loosed from your childhood paradigm. This is why it is so important for children to be discipled well -- and with a reasonable form of faith. The training of a child is deeply ingrained on the psyche. It is a deep structure. It is intuitive, not rational. It is not easily shaken.
As I was being loosed from my childhood paradigm, it would not be easy to replace with something so deeply ingrained. You can believe something with your mind, but that is a fairly weak power over your life, despite what many think. Ideas can come and go easily. It's the deep, gut "beliefs" that direct our actions. They are more affective than cognitive. [4]
Perhaps part of what I'm saying is that you will take easy answers when it is your tribe, when you're in the bubble. Now I would increasingly need good reasons. Now I would need substance.
6. This was also the beginning of peace. The restlessness of soul that began that February afternoon in 1977 had lasted ten years. Insecurity about whether I was saved. "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned." "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned." "What if I can't remember a sin so I can confess it? Does that mean I can never be forgiven for it?" "Has the Lord come back?" "Where's my mother? Is she still here?" "Am I sanctified?" "Have I wanted sanctification enough?"
Some of this neurosis no doubt came from my brain development and general personality. But the Devil also used it with great delight.
Now as I started seminary, I was headed for days of peace and joy, some of the happiest days of my life. Although I loved my family, a cloud of oppression would come over my soul when I would visit home. Then the freedom of the Lord -- the freedom of Galatians -- would return after a day or too back at seminary. It was not a freedom to sin. It was the joy of the Lord.
The one version of God -- unintended no doubt -- was a sheriff sitting there with his revolver just waiting to blow me away if I stepped out of line. The other was a God who was rooting for me to win and helped me get back up if I fell. The one god almost smiled with fiendish delight as I neared a cliff. He nudged Gabriel and said, "Watch this -- he's about to fall off." The other was a God who redirected me away from the cliff without me even knowing it.
The one God said, "Mercy triumphs over judgment" (Jas. 2:13). The other was a god who couldn't control his temper because he was insecure -- just a big guy. He would blow up uncontrollably whenever someone stepped over an arbitrary line he drew just to test me. One was a God of love, the other a god of legalism. One was a God who could sympathize with our weaknesses (Heb. 4:15). The other had no time for anyone who wasn't perfect.
It was the difference between a mature God and a childish one who was less mature than I am.
[1] I've also been working on at least two other sets of "life notes" including a more general one, Notes Along the Way.
[2] I tell about my journey with entire sanctification in Notes Along the Way and in the preface to A Brief Guide to Biblical Holiness.
[3] Again, I discuss this pilgrimage in more detail in Notes Along the Way.
[4] I talk about this in other writing projects like I'm Right; You're Wrong: A Philosophical Pilgrimage. See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013) and James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016).
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2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry
3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law
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