One of my pet peeves is that we often divide things that should be joined and find sharp distinctions where there is really a good deal of continuity.
In many ways, this is the result of modernity. Among the many habits of mind that modernity has foisted upon us is the notion that things can be known best by chopping them up into their constituent parts and studying and analyzing them in the smallest possible units. Its the idea that we can understand a building by understanding bricks, or understand the human body by understanding cells.
To be sure there is much value in studying bricks and cells, but you lose something of the beauty of great architecture and the human mind and body if you focus mainly on the properties of bricks and cells.
iThis is evident in the way we divide our studies into different disciplines and in the Christian world in the way we talk about some subjects in isolation from others. This often happens in an attempt to "rightly divide the Word of Truth," where study the Scriptures inductively, thinking that we can understand the whole of a passage or a book by understanding the sum of it's parts, or verses. Of course inductive study is a valuable tool in bible study, but sometimes you need to understand the whole before you can make sense of the parts. We do the same in theology, looking at particular doctrines in isolation from other doctrines.
And we do this in Christian practice when we make sharp distinctions between things like evangelism and discipleship, or between theology and apologetics. We also do this when we make sharp distinctions between teaching and story. In a technical sense we can distinguish between evangelism and discipleship, theology and apologetics, teaching and story at least when it comes to definitions. But in real life they all bleed together.
Jesus discipled the disciples to evangelize them and in evangelizing them He discipled them. While we usually think of theology as that which explains the faith and apologetics as that which defends the faith, the two are actually interrelated. Apologetics applies theology to the questions of unbelievers and theology often defends the faith against the false doctrines of professing believers. Jesus taught through story and told stories full of teaching.
So the modernist tendency to divide and conquer in order to know truth has some value, in the academy particularly, but in the highways and hedges of life, things that appear separate are often more "joined" than we realize.
And what does this have to do with my friend Glenn Lucke's book Common Grounds you ask? It has everything to do with the book because in it, Glenn and his co-author Ben Young bring together several disciplines and genre's which have traditionally been divided.
The book is a kind of Socratic dialogue involving three friends and a wise old seminary professor. The three friends are at diferent stages of spiritual development, one is from a fairly fundamentalist background, one from a more charismatic background and one is a "former catholic" who is hostile to matters of the faith.
In modernistic evangelicalism we would be taught to apply evangelism and apologetics to the one who is hostile, and discipleship/theology to the other two. And of course, the theology/discipleship applied to the two professing Christians would look very different. We'd probably want to disciple the more charismatic guy in a more intellectual direction and the more fundamentalist guy in a more experiential direction.
What Glenn and Ben do is apply the same remedy to all three. The wise old professor, Dr. MacGregor, enters into a dialogue with all three and shows how the same truth can apply to each in their different situations. The subjects dealt with come straight out of heavy duty theological textbooks. At times they talk about theology proper (i.e. the doctrine of God), the attributes of God and the existence of evil. At other places they talk about general and special revelation. We see applied presuppositional apologetics in action here.
And again, the noteworthy thing is that all of these so-called "deep" subjects are treated in an ordinary, conversational fashion, and are applied to three people at widely differing stages of maturity.
In a subtle, winsome and almost imperceptible way, many evangelical
sacred cows are dealt with here. Or maybe I should say that much
conventional wisdom is turned on its head. Heavy duty theology, which
is often thought of as "meat" for the "mature" is used in the service
of evangelism. Apologetic defenses of the faith challenge the faith of
the believers as they are applied to the unbeliever in the story. No
clear line is drawn here between evangelism and discipleship as the
same truths serve both purposes.
Evangelism here is shown as a process, not an event, which is
entirely biblical. The more I study the Gospels the more convinced I
become that the gospels are the stories of the evangelism, over time,
of the disciples (see this post called "What is the Gospel?" for some more of my thoughts). This is the approach that is taken with Lauren, the unbelieving character in the book.
I also like the way Dr. MacGregor responds to the questions of his
three conversation partners. I fear that, in much of our ministry we
are too preoccupied with getting our point across and not listening to
the question our students are asking, be they believers or unbelievers.
This book offers a good example of people driven ministry as opposed
to technique driven ministry. Ministry is all about being sensitive
and biblically responsive to the questions of those around us. And
knowing that, we can relax and not worry that we don't know all the
right techniques.
Glenn has more books in production and I'm looking forward to reading them. This is a good start and I highly recommend it as a book that may give you a new view of ministry.
Recent Comments