The Bride With a Broken Back

I have something to say.

That will not come as any sort of surprise to people who know me, since I usually talk a lot and write even more! (I once remarked to a pastor friend that I possessed the spiritual gift of long-windedness. Being a preacher, he had the same outpouring, and was honest enough to admit it.)

It is difficult, however, to always know precisely how to say a given thing, even if (usually especially if) the thing is immensely important. One might imagine such a case would be rare for the man who graduated with a BA in English but, alas, no.

Here’s my point: The Bride of Christ in America is trying to function with a broken back. She is paralyzed by unbelief.

I suppose I have, in one way or another, known this was the case as long as I have been a Christian. Even before that, during my messy early teenage years, I was unusually sensitive to theological issues within the wider Body of Christ that to some extent continue to be issues of concern today -- I just didn’t know their root cause, or how to address the problems even if I did.

From the time of my conversion in my senior year of high school until now, I would...notice things. Things that bothered me, things that concerned me, things that I knew were unbiblical and thus sinful but couldn’t really explain or concretely identify. Perhaps most pivotal in this regard was the time I spent as an undergraduate student at an extremely high-profile and academically rigorous -- and benightedly self-proclaimed “evangelical” -- institution in the Southeastern US. To say that I generally found my interactions with students and faculty, including the several in both groups to whom I became close, equal parts vibrantly exhilarating and blatheringly dumbfounding, would be axiomatic.

I underwent a reasonably significant theological sea change while away at school; I transitioned from the doctrinally conservative but minimalist high school senior to the theologically-informed, very conservative, forceful, more spiritually mature post-undergrad I am currently. There are many reasons for this, though the ultimate and most obvious is that I was repeatedly and submissively exposed to Scripture at my local church, and was then forced to proclaim and defend that near-constantly at school.

That in itself was admittedly eye-opening for me. Coming from a public school background as I did, where I was one of only three or four believers, I was eager to be whisked away to what I thought was a place where I could be secure, welcomed, affirmed, and grow. Well, I certainly did grow. And I was secure and so forth on an individual level, among my friends. But to be quite honest, I hadn’t the foggiest idea that evangelicalism was such a profound wreck until I entered what was ostensibly a mainstream evangelical institution.

The anecdotes I have to confirm this are literally almost endless. There was the time I couldn’t finish writing a paper in the library during my sophomore year because a group of students (including one of the men who would be my RA during my senior year) decided to break out into the laughing revival on the first floor, right smack in front of the staircase, distracting everyone and without a soul rising to shut them up (or, as I would have done, politely asked where in Scripture God ever commanded believers to thrash on the floor like crack-infused hyenas to cries of “More, Lord, more!”).

There was the video produced by friends of mine during senior year that contained snippets from students about how God spoke to them, and interestingly not one student that I recall mentioned anything remotely like the most obvious answer: The Bible.

There were the numerous professors who categorically denied inerrancy, and the dozens of others who enabled and covered for them by shrilly proclaiming inerrancy was not a fundamental of the faith, or that the school was supposed to have a broad spectrum of views, or that the school didn’t require instructors to hold to inerrancy (only infallibility or the generically-titled “authority” of Scripture -- without bothering to explain how a non-inerrant text could be considered authoritative in any meaningful sense, or how they could hold to Biblical authority when denying its very claims about itself).

I still remember when I had to explain to a professor friend of mine, an exceptionally bright man with multiple advanced degrees, what the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy was. Or the time I had to explain to a new professor, from 1 Corinthians 15, how a person couldn’t deny the virgin birth or inerrancy and still be saved, because they were implied in the broader statements Paul was making there. (He was not convinced.) I remember the toxic levels of bitterness and invective hurled towards cessationists, often because the faculty or students did not stop to consider that one of them was sitting right there, not unlike how white supremacists cut loose with the N-word when they think they’re among friends. I remember how one theology professor would openly slander Calvinism during class lectures and of course not one student (except for me, the token Calvinist) would speak up, because not one student had any real theological grounding or exposure; they had no idea what they were being taught wasn’t true.

I have literally dozens of stories, from conversations with professors to reading papers as a coach at the college’s writing center, to overhearing things friends or colleagues said when they thought I wasn’t listening. Classroom lectures, long talks during office hours with a favorite instructor and best friend, quotes I still remember from textbooks, dreadful things I can’t forget from the mercifully few times I ever dared to waste time at the chapel services…I kept my eyes and ears open. I kept my nose in my Bible and good Christian books. I prayed nonstop.

And I learned.

And the main thing I learned was that the root problem, behind all of these errant comments and bad practice and things that everyone, without question or reflection, accepted to be true, was one thing: Unbelief.

I do not mean that the people I met were not Christians. I have no reason to question the salvation of essentially everyone I met while away at school. Rather, I mean this: God has spoken, unequivocally and clearly in His Word. This is not something one needs a Th.D. to understand. He has spoken, and He did not stutter, and He expects (and desires!) to be heard, believed, and obeyed.

The problem I found at my college was that basically everyone I met, on some level, recognized that God has spoken, and simply chose to not believe what He said.

Certainly, it is a bit more complicated than that -- in fairness, most of the people to whom I refer would probably quite vigorously say they are in fact believing God, that their interpretations of Scripture are just different (read: less stringent) than mine. To an extent, that is true. But I would wager that their interpretations are different precisely because they are not believing God’s Word.

Take the foundational premise I alluded to above: the authority of Scripture. Anyone with two synapses to rub together can see the Bible:

• is the final authority for God's people in everything they believe and do (Deuteronomy 32:47; Proverbs 13:13, 16:20; John 12:47-49; 1 Corinthians 2:10-16);

• is without any error or contradiction in the original manuscripts on all matters to which it speaks (Psalm 119:142,151,160; John 10:35, 17:17);

• must be the control and filter for the believer's thinking (1 Corinthians 14:37; 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21);

• asserts the by-definition, unilateral, unconditional, and lifetime duty of believers to mark themselves off as slaves and submissive learners of Jesus by conforming every area of their lives to His Word, knowing intimately His truth, persevering therein, and thusly being continually set free from the corruption of unbelief, autonomy, and bondage (John 8:31-32; cf. Matthew 28:19; Colossians 3:16; 1 Timothy 6:3-4); and

• is completely sufficient to address any spiritual need of any person in any age (2 Timothy 3:15-17).

See? That isn’t a matter of interpretation, much less a secondary or unimportant issue: That is the blatant, unvarnished, obvious teaching of Scripture. If words mean anything remotely intelligible, there is no way for an honest interpreter to get around this.

The problem, however, is that many of the people I met simply did not believe this. I in part blame the kind of scholarship they were exposed to as a reason, but even apart from that, when I talked to people, they simply did not believe some or all of those things. The reasons varied: perhaps those were just one interpretation of the passages cited; perhaps they were simply ignorant and untaught; perhaps they had become too intellectual and divorced their faith from their scholarship, leading to deplorable theology; perhaps they simply strained their ears to listen for the inward voice of the Holy Spirit and did not need to concern themselves with “theological minutiae,” since after all cessationism was worldly and functional deism by confining God to a book.

And yet…and yet…

What else do you call it when there is a clear, authoritative, binding, inerrant word from the Living God (which is to say: any word from God), and, for whatever surface reason and however sincerely or humbly or politely, it is not believed?

Unbelief.

Professed Christians today are in a predicament. They gladly name the name of Christ, yet do not know, or do not believe, that the definition of a Christian is one who has savingly yoked themselves to the Lordship of Christ, to learn from and relate to Him as Lord in every area of life -- and that the most fundamental element of that yoking is to understand, own and embrace the authority of His Word in all things. That many believe and live in direct contradiction to that claim, and do so without realizing it, is the root problem not only of every theological and practical problem within American Christianity, but in the personal lives of millions of people as well.

Over the next weeks, we will explore in some detail these issues, examine what the Scriptures have to say, and hopefully find a cure.

And I have it on good authority that there most certainly is (cf. Zechariah 1:3; Joel 2:12; Matthew 3:2; Acts 20:23; Romans 8:13, 15:13).

“Leave your simple ways, and live, and walk in the way of insight…the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Proverbs 9:6, 10, ESV).