Resting or Rooting

God has graciously allowed Sheri and I to rear six wonderful children. My wife has nursed each one of them. Thus, I have been able to observe the nursing process up close. When our child was hungry for his/her mother’s milk, nothing else would do. When my wife or I would hold them, they would not settle down, but would be actively rooting. They did not want to be comforted or cradled. They were often cranky and flailing until they got what they wanted.  Conversely, after they were weaned they would readily crawl up into our laps and seek to be cradled, especially when they were sick. Our arms were a refuge rather than a refilling station.

In Psalm 131:2, David picks up on this imagery as he describes his relationship with God– “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother: like a weaned child is my soul within me.” (ESV) Rather than crawling up into the lap of my loving Father and quietly resting, I often flail and fight as I demand to understand things that are beyond me or relentlessly pursue my own dreams (131:1– “I do not have great aspirations, or concern myself with things that are beyond me.” [NET]). We have to learn to live with our limitations as we rest in the arms of our faithful God. The life of faith must accept the mystery of God’s ways and the disappointments of personal expectations. David ends the psalm in verse three with a call to his fellow Jews to rest in God as a way of life – “O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.” At the end of the day, the only way to live with our limitations in understanding and accomplishments is to rest in our limitless God.

Doug Finkbeiner

Are You a Word-Centered or a Spirit-Centered Christian?

A choice commonly placed before believers at some time in their Christian experience is the suggestion, or even demand, that they center their lives on the Bible, or alternately, on the Holy Spirit. Either they live their lives according to the written Word, or they live guided by the Spirit. This great divide has never been more obvious than today. Some Christian traditions emphasize strict adherence to the Bible, while others believe such an approach is too mechanical, and would rather be led experientially by the Spirit. Which approach is correct? A look back into history may help.

While most evangelicals associate Martin Luther with the Lutheran church and erroneous views of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (and rightly so), Luther was one of the first Reformers to challenge the authority of the Roman Catholic Church by declaring the primary authority of Scripture over the papacy. Luther was Word-centered and demanded that everything be judged by the Word of God (the fact that he failed to do so completely is clear, but anachronistic).

In contrast, the radical reformer Thomas Müntzer emphasized a Spirit-centered Christian life. He stressed an inner-oriented hearing by man that would lead him from bondage to freedom. For Müntzer, “the God who speaks is the God who is experienced directly in the heart” (Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations, Blackwell, 1996, 151).

For many Christians today, this sounds appealing. Who doesn’t want to experience God directly in the heart? Who doesn’t want a dynamic walk of faith where God speaks directly to you? But this approach also has a dark side. It appeals to our narcissism and rebellion by doing away with an objective authority for truth and making our own individual experience with God supreme. The example of Müntzer is instructive because of the direction that his Spirit-centered theology took. Unmoored from Scripture, he began to teach that the knowledge of God was not teachable, but could only be conferred in connection with a spirit-worked faith saturated with experience. Thus, he called for a reversal from the traditional movement from the external to internal. He concluded that the living Word of God must be heard from God’s own mouth and not from books, not even the Bible.

This is always where Spirit-centered theology leads. Luther was right to demand a Word-centered faith. While a Word-centered faith can at times become cold and clinical, with little evidence of the Spirit or His fruits, without the foundation of the authority of Scripture over experience a person’s Christian life will be built upon sinking sand. There are plenty of examples of supposed Word-centered churches, ministries, and people with little evidence of the Spirit of God. But life that is properly centered on the Word will exhibit both the stability of revelation and the vitality of the Spirit.

How can you tell which you are? Ask yourself a few questions:

Þ   Do you savor every chance to read, meditate on, memorize, and apply the written Word of God? Or does your Christian life consist primarily of “talking to God,” with little attention to the Word?

Þ   Is it difficult to go a day or two without the Word? Or do you find it hard to get yourself to open and read the Bible?

Þ   Do your prayers flow out of what you read in the Scriptures today? Or do they revolve primarily around yourself, your problems, and your concerns?

Þ   Are you right now pursuing some intentional study of something in the Bible? Or is your Christian walk a passive “go with the flow”?

It has been my experience that Spirit-centered Christians tend to judge their own spiritual maturity far more positively than perhaps they should, and the reason is simple: they are judging everything by feeling. While they claim that they are being led by the Spirit, and not feelings, their faith is as subjective as that of any theological liberal. They have forgotten a fundamental biblical and theological truth:

The Spirit works primarily through the Word!

That is, the choice of being Word-centered or Spirit-centered is not an “either-or” but a “both-and,” with the Word being primary. We must be Spirit-centered people, but that only comes through being Word-centered. Paul captures this truth in 2 Corinthians 3:18 when he speaks of the reading of God’s Word:

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord [in the written Word], are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

Transformation by the Spirit only comes through beholding Christ in the Word. The Scriptures must be primary in a believer’s life. It is only through being Word-centered that we can be assured of the truth AND live a Spirit-filled life.

There Was No Golden Age in the History of the Church

How often have you heard people lament that these days are not like the “good old days”? Perceptions of the past state of the world or Christianity are often skewed, reflecting the selective memories of individuals or the selective reading of the historical record. We like to think that there was a Golden Age when true and pure Christianity was dominant and Christians all lived happy, holy lives, but the more history I read, the more I believe the idea is a fantasy.

Westminster Seminary church historian, Carl Trueman reminds us that this pining for an ideal era of Christianity has a long history that goes back at least to the Reformation:

One harmful but guiding assumption of much of Reformation and post-Reformation historiography has been that there are ‘golden ages’ such that the present state of the church pales in comparison to some perceived time when all was right with the church…

The Golden Age model has two faults. First, it typically smooths out the rough spots in a particular era by treating theology as though it dropped out of the sky, or, perhaps better, straight out of the Bible. It does not. Humans do theology in specific historical, cultural contexts, and theological issues are always more complex than the Golden Age model allows. One does not have to reduce everything to an extreme materialist model of history to acknowledge the truth of this statement.

In addition, it does not always allow for the fact that we live in the late twentieth century, not the sixteenth or seventeenth. If one wishes to appropriate the sixteenth or seventeenth century, for example, as a model for contemporary church theology, one must do without blinkers and with an awareness of the theological, cultural and philosophical developments between then and now. Ignoring the critical questions of history does not make them go away.

(Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment,ed. Carl R. Trueman and R. S. Clark; Paternoster, 1999, xvi.)

With that last statement Trueman reminds us that we need to tell the whole story, a story that takes all the aspects of life into consideration: political, sociological, and cultural. We cannot imagine that none of these things mattered or had an influence on the times. Additionally, if we wish for the good old days of selective memory or reading, we have to take the good and the bad. If it’s the Reformation we wish for, we have to take the inherent violence and political instability of the times, in addition to the somewhat rudimentary post-Catholic church order and life. If we long for the great revivals of the 18th or 19th centuries we have to take the extreme emotionalism, moralism and nationalism that were often confused with the gospel.

Rather than wish for the “good old days,” we ought to take the advice of Solomon, who recommended against idolizing the past, and instead instructed us to enjoy the present, warts and all:

Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this…In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him. (Eccl. 7:10, 14)