Evangelical Reformation

Jeff Goldblatt, Fox News reporter, had stationed himself outside the Superdome as thousands lined up to take shelter from the coming Hurricane. To survey the sentiments of the people who had been waiting for several hours as the line crawled slowly toward the entrance, he would occasionally interview someone from the crowd.

“Now here’s someone with an especially good attitude,” Jeff noted as he pointed his mic toward Jackie. She was an African American woman who appeared to be in her late 40’s and who displayed a great deal of energy and buoyancy despite the situation. It didn’t seem so much that she was talking with the television audience, as it did that the mic was catching the overflow of her personality that was splashing in all directions.

Jeff waded into her stream of consciousness as she was philosophizing on the appropriate attitude for those entering the Superdome. “They warned us to leave, and since we didn’t take their advice we can’t complain about our plight, whatever that might be.” “Well, why didn’t you leave?” Jeff queried. “Most of my family did leave,” Jackie responded, “but a few had to stay behind (she didn’t explain why), so I decided that I would rather stay here and die with them than come back and bury them.” She further indicated that those family members were already inside, but that she had stayed outside to encourage those who were awaiting entrance.

Then Jackie switched from philosophy to theology, asserting that God was in control, and that He would protect or take the life of whomever He chose. As she continued to expound on how everything is in God’s hands, Jeff, apparently eager to hear the next point in her sermon, asked what she would say to the listening audience. As I recall, her first word was “repent.” That’s not a word we hear very much in church anymore, let alone on national news broadcasts.

The refreshing quality about Jackie was that she was not attempting to slip in a word for Jesus. She was just being Jackie, living her daily life for God, and a microphone just happened to be there while she was doing it. It was all so natural and refreshing.

I don’t know anything else about Jackie. I would assume that as I write she is still in the Superdome with her family, now waiting to be transported to some other location. But what came across was a genuine, solid commitment to the Lord and the attending attitudes and actions.

In my call for an evangelical reformation, I am encouraged by two factors. It is a blessing to see indicators of some movement in the direction of reformation, of a return to a more biblical perspective. Books such as The Purpose Driven Life propagate the underlying theme that life is not about us, but about God. Choice Ministries, a campus outreach organization, accentuates the same theme. These and other developments indicate that the me-centered approach to Christianity spawned under the influence of psychology is starting to give way to a more biblical orientation. We still have a long way to go, but there is movement in the right direction.

Another encouraging factor is found in that segment of evangelical Christianity that never was taken in by the psychological message. That segment usually consists of salt of the earth people who are not sophisticated enough to see the king’s clothes, and who are pressed too hard by the realities of life to buy into comfortable concepts that don’t work. They just read the Bible and believe it and do their best to live it. Thankfully, it was Jackie, and not a more sophisticated evangelical, who got to speak for Jesus on national television Sunday night.

We have been discussing the two ways that people respond to input. Some, even evangelicals, are sponges that just soak up everything without analysis, especially if they view the source as an authority. Others, unfortunately a smaller contingent, filter input through the grids of empirical evidence, reason, and in the case of evangelical filters, Scripture.

Stating the case bluntly, sponges are naïve and gullible, buying intellectual swamp land in Florida without ever wondering whether they have been swindled. Sponges are especially vulnerable to contemporary psychological concepts, tending to swallow them hook, line, and sinker. The more ludicrous, the more counterintuitive the concept might be, the more they stand in awe of the genius of the originator. They ask in amazement, “How did he ever see that?” never wondering that the insight may be incredible because it was erroneous.

One secular example of such an astounding insight is found in Freud’s Oedipus complex, which is a tribute not so much to his acute insight as to his vivid imagination. An evangelical example of this phenomenon is found in the assertion by evangelical psychologists that the person with high self-esteem is really the humble one, while those with a poor self-image are proud. Examples abound of such counterintuitive concepts that have no support from research, but which are merely figments of the fertile imaginations of psychologists, and byproducts of their humanistic worldviews. But sponges don’t need research to believe. The pronouncement of the expert is sufficient.

Having cast sponging in a bad light, it is important to point out that there is a time to sponge. The Word of God is perfect. Therefore, when we read the Bible, we should turn off our filter and approach it as sponges. We should soak up, unfiltered, everything it says.

Granted, the Bible requires interpretation because it includes figurative language, some passages can be understood in two or more ways, and some of the sayings of Scripture seem to be obscure. Nonetheless, our goal should be to discern what the author was seeking to say, and then to accept that message at face value.

As human nature would have it, it is precisely at the point that we should function as sponges that we start to operate like filters. These filters, however, are a different type than the rational and empirical filters some use to process other input. The filter most commonly used with Scripture is the comfort filter. If we feel comfortable with a given interpretation, we embrace it.

Discomfort comes from several different directions. If an interpretation does not fit into my current worldview it makes me feel uneasy. It calls made to rethink some previous conclusions and perhaps even admit that some were wrong. Probably we are most uncomfortable with passages that tell us to change our lifestyle, especially when the changes are more demanding than our current approach to life.

In today’s evangelical world, this comfort filter has been enhanced substantially by psychological concepts that give support to more comfortable perspectives. For example, we are assured by many evangelical psychologists that performance has no impact on our relationship with God. In other words, if you are living you’re your boyfriend or if you are watching pornography, this has no impact on how God feels about you or deals with you. Therefore, as the argument is often crassly stated, we do not get brownie points with God by cleaning up our act.

Such a position requires a very powerful filter because so many passages of Scripture would indicate otherwise. Even a casual reading of 1 John, or practically any other book of the Bible for that matter, clearly conveys that this concept is wrong, that how we live has serious implications for our relationship with God. However, the comfortable approach to the Christian life provided by the “performance doesn’t matter” filter is powerful enough to screen out all of those verses. This is just one of the many psychological filters used by evangelicals as they read Scripture.

Removing these filters and reading Scripture as sponges would produce a whole different perspective on life that would bring about an evangelical reformation.

People can be categorized as sponges or filters. This is even true of believers.

Like a sponge soaking up water off a messy counter, some people soak up, unprocessed, whenever data is presented to them, especially if said by someone they perceive to be an expert. For them, authors and teachers are experts, so they soak up whatever they read or they are taught.

Other people, a much smaller segment it seems, function more like a filter on a faucet, processing the water, removing harmful substances, and only allowing that which is pure to pass through. They analyze what they read and hear to determine its validity.

While I was attending New York University, a faculty member from a Bible college was with me in one of the courses. It amazed me that even in the midst of such a secular environment, with an orientation antithetical to a biblical worldview, this person tended to accept what he was taught at face value. It seemed that his assumption was that the teacher was the expert, and therefore must be right.

We can either be sponges or filters. As we read, listen, watch, or otherwise take in information, we can either be passive or active in the process. We can either accept what we hear at face value or critique it to determine whether it is compatible with teaching of Scripture and an empirical and rational evaluation of the world around us.

Functioning like a sponge requires no work. Filtering can be laborious. In addition, being a sponge is not threatening. People like us when we accept what they are telling us and when we go along with the cultural mainstream. However, filtering often exposes error, which leads the filtering individual to respond in unpopular ways, to stand out from the crowd, to swim upstream rather than float downstream. Perhaps that is why there are more sponges than filters.

Some sponges make an attempt to protect themselves from the intake of pollution by identifying safe sources. They only soak up the water on certain countertops. For example, if they hear it on Christian radio or if they read it in a Christian book, they drink it in. Conversely, if it comes from a secular source they reject it. Such an approach is problematic because in this polluted world it is not safe to drink from any human fountain without filtering first. Also, some secular sources have good things to say. Therefore, assuming that they are wrong out of hand deprives us of some good insights and places us in an indefensible position.

In our previous posts we have been discussing types of communication that tend to bypass our filtering process. Pictures and other types of non-rational communication tend to infiltrate our worldview without conscious critique. The media, news and entertainment, wield these weapons with great effectiveness, shaping our worldview without our awareness. These propaganda experts are so good at what they do that often they manage to bypass the processing facility of even the filtering types among us. The sponges don’t stand a chance.

To make matters worse, our educational system encourages people to be sponges and deprives students of filtering capabilities. Being a sponge takes no training, but filtering requires the development of analytical skills. Worse yet, contemporary education actually creates a bias against filtering, encouraging students to process the data of life emotionally rather than by empirical and rational (not to mention biblical) analysis. Therefore, we have become a culture, and an evangelical subculture, that has absorbed all sorts of polluted ideas.

Therefore, it is essential, especially for evangelicals, to ramp up the filtering process, carefully screening all input from all sources. We also need to again filter the ideas that have flowed into our worldview to determine if they are genuinely biblical. Doing so effectively would expose a significant number of current evangelical concepts to be unbiblical, and in turn would begin an evangelical reformation. Are you a sponge or a filter?