The Feeler and the Thinker ======================== Often, there is that loud disagreement or that quiet disdain among those of us, who experience and feel God a lot and those of us, who think much and are soaked in theology and Gods word. As such, more often than not, loads of misunderstanding, division and disunity thus arise unnecessarily. Perhaps, one of the best people who have rightly state the need for balance and wisdom, in both camps would be Edmund Chan in his book, Growing Deep in God. ...we Christians do make claims that are not theologically sound. There is no greater place in the Contemporary Church for unsound theological assertions than in the realm of our subjective experiences. While a personal walk with God is key to authentic discipleship (and thus, I honour the value of true religious experiences), I am nonetheless concerned about the subjective (and often superstitious) way in which we theorise about God in the light of our experiences rather than in the light of the Scriptures. Moreover, I am also concerned that we make our personal experience - what is but subjective to us - normative for everyone. It is important that we get our theology right and that our theology be informed by the Word of God. ... Our problem is that instead of learning about God from Gods point of view (through the divine revelations in the Scriptures), we think about Him from our point of view (through personal prejudices). Notice that I do not say personal experiences but rather, personal prejudices. I believe that authentic discipleship leads us to personal experiences with God. The biblical narratives are full of stories about ordinary people experiencing extraordinary engagements with God in daily life. Divine revelation and personal experiences must go hand in hand.We need fresh encounters with God. Our problem is not with our personal experiences, but our subjectives prejudices. Permit me to be deliberately but lovingly provocative here. When we reject religious experiences because they do not fit neatly into our theological paradigms, we have become subjectively prejudiced. We shun religious experiences with an evangelical smugness and look upon emotions with disdain, forgetting that Jesus Himself wept and that it was God who created us as emotional beings with emotional faculties. I know of well- meaning Christians who criticise every religious experience outside their own comfort zone as too emotional. And they do so sincerely out of the misguided notion that the Scriptures are against such things. If we are humble enough, we would acknowledge that very often, our own subjective interpretations of the Scriptures (and the comfort zone of our backgrounds and subjective preferences!) rather than Scripture itself became the man-made yardstick to judge religious experiences. We fail to recognise that while God is not contradictory to the Scriptures, He is bigger than our interpretations of it. We cannot put God in a neat theological box nor create God in the image of man. Conversely, when we make our experiences (rather than the Word of God) the yardstick of our theology, we are likewise guilty of prejudice. So, when we think, Since God has done this for me in this particular way, He will do the same thing for you in the same way, we do not know God. Rather, we are micro-managing Him! In the same way, if we seek someone elses anointing or experience (which is often sought as a spiritual quick fix in our therapeutic generation, and more often than not for our own glory rather than Gods), we have mistaken the subjective for the normative. We do not know the God who sovereignly gives to whomever He wills, whatever He wills, whenever He wills. Why do we often seek the anointing and reject lifes problems when, from Gods point of view, we grow much more through the anguish than the anointing? We lack the discerning wisdom of balance. While it is true that we should not stoically accept every pain in life as the will of God for us, we need to recognise that sometimes God uses the pains of life as a blessing in disguise and a tutor for our growth. So, we should not dismiss every pain and problem as outside Gods will for us. The anointing may enlarge our capacities, but it is the anguish that deepens our character. A theology that cannot survive the onslaught of anguish is worthless. So, with humility, let us embrace personal experiences with God that are deep. But let us not embrace subjective prejudices by making them normative or by seeking borrowed experiences from someone elses encounter with God. For man shall not live by experiences alone, but by the living Word of the living God. The Church of today faces a serious theological crisis. The ideological virus of secular humanism has been so entrenched in our Christian mindsets that our our ability to think deeply about the things of God has been entirely compromised, often without our realising it. Herein lies the severity of the problem: we are unaware of the extent to which our thinking has been compromised and shaped by a secular mindset. We accept as a norm the profound lack of willingness, or ability, to think deeply and consistently about truth. We are lulled into a passive mode of thinking. Instead of countering the fallacy of secular philosophy with rich biblical and theological truths, and a deep life congruent with those truths, we live in a generation where a sound theological foundation is ignored, or worse, even disdained. Unexamined assumptions shape the intellectual contours of a lazy and slothful generation, tainting the moral and spiritual landscape of the soul. As such, one of the distinct weakness of the modern Church is that of having zeal without knowledge. We end up with a superficial faith without a deep theological foundation. Indeed, as it has been said, thinking without roots will result in flowers but no fruit. In the revolution of ideas, what engages the Christian mind is no longer whats true, but rather, what works. Of course, pragmatism has its value. But when truth is sacrificed at the altar of pragmatism, we engage life with a severe short-sightedness that will preclude both a deep soul and a lasting spiritual legacy. This theological crisis is not merely an intellectual one. It is essentially a spiritual crisis. For at the heart of this theological crisis is an anthropocentric (or man-centred) worldview that corrupts our whole orientation of life - even our basic orientation to the spirituality of prayer. We focus on the sacrifices we make, the duties we perform, the commitments we have. Prayer becomes more about us than about God. We approach the Scriptures in the same way. We read it primarily for answers to our questions, for solutions to our problems, for comfort to our needs or for insight to boost our egos. We see ourselves as the centre of gravity in life, around which all things revolve. Instead of God being our anchor, we ourselves have become our own pitiful security. Instead of depending on and acknowledging Gods gracious provision, we depend on our intelligence, our wealth, our resources or our own resourcefulness. Instead of God being our true magnificent delight, we ourselves have become our own fatal attraction. Malcolm Muggeridge rightly warned, What will finally destroy us is not communism nor fascism, but man acting like God. We live in an age of unmitigated anthropocentric narcissism! Case in point: ask any Christian why Christ came to earth, and the most common answer given is, He came to die on the cross for our sins. This is true but inadequate. The fundamental problem with this answer is that it is too man-centred. As if the world revolved around us! While it is true that Christ came to earth to die for our sins, it is more significant to understand that Christ came, first and foremost, to glorify God, not to gratify man! Jesus declared conclusively, My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work (John 4:34). The glory of God was of utmost importance to Jesus, and thus, Gods will was paramount for Him. - Edmund Chan, Growing Deep in God, Chapter Three, Getting Your Theology Right
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 13:24:24 +0000
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