I'm back looking at that Rachel Held Evans' chapter
'Adaptation'. Like last time, I'll start with a longish quote.
It seems that a whole lot of people,
both Christians and non-Christians, are under the impression that you can’t be
a Christian and vote for a Democrat, you can’t be a Christian and believe in
evolution, you can’t be a Christian and be gay, you can’t be a Christian and
have questions about the Bible, you can’t be a Christian and be tolerant of
other religions, you can’t be a Christian and be a feminist, you can’t be a
Christian and drink or smoke, you can’t be a Christian and read the New York
Times, you can’t be a Christian and support gay rights, you can’t be a
Christian and get depressed, you can’t be a Christian and doubt. In fact, I am
convinced that what drives most people away from Christianity is not the cost
of discipleship but rather the cost of false fundamentals. False fundamentals
make it impossible for faith to adapt to change. The longer the list of
requirements and contingencies and prerequisites, the more vulnerable faith
becomes to shifting environments and the more likely it is to fade slowly into
extinction. When the gospel gets all entangled with extras, dangerous
ultimatums threaten to take it down with them. The yoke gets too heavy and we
stumble beneath it.
It's important to add that a couple of paragraphs later
Rachel also writes,
Of course, we all carry around false
fundamentals.
This is one reason why I like Rachel. She understands, if I
may say it this way, that she sins too. Here is
humility. Very refreshing. And may God bless His
Church with many more like her.
Now, I think that she is obviously right when she talks about
false fundamentals. We attach to what it means to be a Christian, things that
just have no business being associated with the faith. So, what are we to do?
First, we need to acknowledge, as Rachel did, that we all have a problem here.
Then, we need to identify the false fundamentals that we are carrying around so
that we can get rid of them.
Sounds good. But now a critical
question. How do we do that? How can we even recognize our false
fundamentals? The answer to this begins by recognizing true
fundamentals.
Jesus faced the same problem that Rachel described. He may
not have labelled it ‘false fundamentals', but that's what we see Him dealing
with as He confronted the false teaching of His day.
One set of false fundamentals had to do with 'the tradition
of the elders'. Here, learned teachers of the past had concluded, 'You can't be a Jew and …' What followed was quite a list of
things. The items on the list were different from Rachel's list that I quoted
above, but it was the same idea: false fundamentals.
Consider the time that Jesus' disciples fell afoul of one of
those traditions.
And the Pharisees and the scribes
asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the
elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah
prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with
their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ You leave the commandment of
God and hold to the tradition of men.” And he said to them, “You have a fine
way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!
For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles
father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or
his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given
to God)— then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother,
thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.
And many such things you do.” (Mark 7.5-13)
So, here's the Pharisee's false fundamental: the tradition of
ritual hand washing before eating as an act of religious purity. Jesus confronted
them. 'False fundamentals!' But note how He made His
case. He quotes Scripture. First, there's that tidbit from Isaiah that speaks
to the general problem of holding to some faulty tradition. Then, Jesus follows
up with something from Moses. Here, He shows that what they were teaching
conflicted with what God had already said. False fundamentals!
All of that leads me to this. False fundamentals can only be
exposed for what they are only by evaluating them according to a true
fundamental, God's revelation of truth, the Bible. It is by a careful study of
the Scriptures that we will be able to come to see more and more clearly those
false fundamentals that we hold to and which cloud our vision.
At some point, (maybe my next post?) I would like to discuss
what 'a careful study of the Scriptures' looks like.
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