V. Wake Up Calls
During my time in seminary at RTS I had numerous wake-up calls, some on the intellectual front, but mainly on the spiritual front. I received those wake-up calls from all kinds of angles.
Intellectually, I thought I would go to seminary to attain ever increasing knowledge of the things of God and gain an arsenal of knowledge that would help me in my ministry. In other words, I thought I would go to seminary to become smarter. But something strange happened while at RTS – I came away feeling much dumber than I did when I went in.
This is paradoxical in many ways because I know that I knew more facts about the faith when I left seminary than when I began. Yet, I felt comparatively dumber because questions were asked and doors were opened that caused me to see just how much there was to know about God and how little I knowledge I had acquired.
One of my professors explained to us that, in the Christian faith, there are shruggers and sluggers. Shruggers are those who tend to shrug their shoulders and admit they don’t know the answer to a problem. Sluggers are those who believe that they have the ability to figure out the answers to almost any question if they just have enough time and resources. Of course, shruggers slug for awhile and sluggers shrug eventually on some matters. But the shruggers are the ones who are a little more comfortable with the idea of mystery in the faith and are quicker to admit that they have approached the limits of their own understanding. I went in with a slugger attitude and left with a shrugger attitude.
I was fortunate to go to a seminary that asked the hard questions about God and admitted that we didn’t have all the answers. I was also pleased to be at a seminary that was as willing to question our own tradition as it was the tradition of others.
I am a Presbyterian by conviction, and believe in Reformed theology because I think it is biblical, not because I have a family tradition of following it. When I got to seminary I arrived with the attitude that I had attained a pinnacle of theological understanding by embracing Reformed theology. Thankfully, the professors who knew Reformed theology much better than I ever will didn’t operate under that mistaken notion. In one of my systematic theology classes we had to write two major papers for the semester – one on the holiness of God, the other on the sinful nature of man. The prof said that these are the two major issues that everyone has to wrestle with, and as long as we wrestle with them diligently, he can accept where a person came out, whether it was Calvinistic or Arminian. I thought that was very gracious, and it was something I needed to hear.
Another professor encouraged us to get over ourselves in so many ways. In a class on the Old Testament Prophets, our instructor Richard Pratt compared the ministry of the Old Testament prophets to the ministry of those of us today who think we are modern prophets. He pointed out that, in the era in which these guys were prophesying there were some extreme things going on. People were building altars to foreign gods in the temple, they were having sex in the temple, engaging in child sacrifice and things like that. That’s what they thundered against. And then he turned to us and said, “yet you guys will call down thunder from heaven on someone who isn’t consistent in their quiet times.”
He was saying that we all fancy ourselves a prophet, and we all fancy ourselves to be critics and yet the things we thunder against in others lives aren’t anywhere comparable to what true prophets thundered against. Our strong speech and many of the stands we take are taken to bolster our own egos.
That hit home for me because it was the story of my life. Earlier I mentioned that my best friend had told me never to consider entering the ministry because of my opinionated ways. My “opinionation” came about because I carried with me a kind of prophetic sense, that it was my job to save the world and the church from the evil of its ways. Yet, this very “prophetic sense” nearly became my undoing.
The greatest wake-up call came for me toward the end of my seminary career. I had been getting a few wake-ups here and there, but they weren’t really sinking in, at least not as far as they should have. As the end of seminary drew near I began looking for a place to serve and the thing I really wanted to do was work with our denomination’s campus ministry – Reformed University Fellowship. The seminary’s admissions director also worked for RUF so I interviewed with him and the process was going along swimmingly until it came time to check references.
Now, when you list references on your resume you assume that they are going to say something nice about you. As it turned out, some of my references, and a few other people who knew me also knew the guy I was interviewing with and they tried to warn him off from me. They told him that he didn’t want me, that I was legalistic and judgmental and that I would turn kids off. This was news to me; I couldn’t see that I was all of that. I was just sincerely committed to Christ and serious about my faith.
I followed up with some of those people and learned about myself from their perspective. At this time in my life, my wife and I were influenced by a movement of folks who practiced a fairly extreme form of withdrawal from the world. We didn’t watch TV, we didn’t read worldly magazines, we rarely went to movies and were very scrupulous about what we did watch. Our kids weren’t old enough for school yet, but we knew that God’s plan was for kids to be homeschooled and that you were at least making a mistake by sending your kids to public school, if not downright sinning.
And the thing is, those are valid convictions for some folks. But they can also be very legalistic things. The difference between conviction and legalism is that someone with a conviction feels certain that God has called them to this particular belief or way of life. A legalist believes that because God has called them to this particular belief or way of life, that He has also called everyone else to that same belief or way of life.
That was my problem at the time. If I came to your house and you were watching TV and asked me if I liked the show you were watching, I might say something like “no, I don’t watch TV.” Now think about that answer for a minute. You didn’t ask me if I watched TV in my house, you asked me if I liked that particular show. So, I answered a question you didn’t ask and which you probably didn’t care to know about. Why would I do such a thing? It was a very subtle way of asserting my moral superiority to you. I probably said it nicely, but the way I said gave off a certain kind of vibe. The vibe was that I was more spiritual than you.
There were plenty of other ways that I did this, and by the way, you need to know that I have always been a pretty nice guy, at least in demeanor. I don’t yell at people, and my tone of voice has always been pretty even, there is nothing overtly offensive in my manner. Yet, I used my words in very judgmental ways. I was always up for a debate. I was always ready to correct something you said.
The reason this kind of criticism didn’t seek in when it was offered by my best friend was that, at the time, it didn’t really cost me anything. Even though he thought I was a jerk, he still gave me rides to school and we got along reasonably well. But, in seminary, this criticism cost me a place in ministry, which I desperately wanted. Before then, if people couldn’t handle the truth I thought I was telling them, that was their problem. Now though, I was in a place where I might lose the thing I wanted most – a place of ministry.
As it turned out, I was never "officially" turned down by RUF because of these negative references. They went through an organizational shakeup about that time and just weren’t able to hire anyone. I don’t know if I would have landed a position with them or not. Either way, the cold hard truth about who I was began to sink in – I wasn’t the spiritual giant I thought I was. I had become legalistic, arrogant and judgmental.
Such an attitude plays well in some arenas and there are those Christians who will praise such an attitude. But I was in with a group of folks whom I genuinely liked, and it was quite a blow to hear these things from them. Fortunately, they were loving enough to help me grow out of this.
I’ll talk about some things I learned as a result of this in the next section, but for now, one important lesson comes to mind.
The same prof who told us seminary boys that we weren’t the prophets we thought we were urged us to lighten up on those around us. This is especially hard for Calvinists because, after all, we know that everyone is totally depraved. Our problem is that we don’t realize that we are as totally depraved as everyone else, like those bad ol’ Arminians. This prof encouraged us to realize that most folks are doing the best they can with what they’ve got.
To be sure there’s a whole lot of sin going on in the church and there is much to speak out against. But, if you take the time to get to know the people you sit next to in the pews you will find that most of them are giving this Christianity thing their best shot. They’re not doing it perfectly, but they’re giving it their best shot. That was a radical thought for me - that I could lighten up on people and leave them alone.
An even more radical thought was the idea that, though other people weren’t where they needed to be spiritually, I could actually trust God to sanctify them in His way in His time. Wow – what a concept. It was almost as if God was sovereign or something like that. I didn’t have to play God in someone else’s life because God could do the job Himself.
But the most radical thought in all of this came in a conversation with my pastor. I was waxing eloquent one day as we were riding in the car on all of the things that we as Christians needed to avoid. He listened patiently and finally said to me, “David, if you want to you can avoid all of these worldly temptations to sin and you can withdraw so far from the world that they can’t touch you. But when you withdraw from the sin in the world into your little hermitage, just remember that the sin you take with you into your hermitage will be worse than any sin that you left out there in the world.”
Excellent David - I appreciated the clear and simple explanation of legalism. And the part about the prophets. Very good advice I think. I am really enjoying following this story. Thanks for being so open.
Posted by: Catez | February 07, 2005 at 08:51 PM
One of the most gracious things God can ever do to a person is to bring them around in an area where they were completely off the mark. My problem has always been getting people bold enough to correct me. Very often I've found I had huge gaping holes in my life and nobody bothered to tell me, even though they saw them.
On another note, I don't watch TV. It was banned in my house on intellectual grounds, so now it's just not in my system. I had cable for a few months a while back, and I eventually gave up because I couldn't find anything good on at a time when I was interested in watching it. Unfortunately, now I have a hard time mentioning to people that I have usually no clue what they're going on about when they talk about TV.
Posted by: Kyle | February 08, 2005 at 11:33 AM