I’ve been thinking about our roles as Christians, bloggers, and people who seek Truth for a while now, even before last week’s social media blow-up about Thabiti Anyabwile’s post that I responded to this past Thursday. I’ve been thinking about how we interact with each other. How we talk to each other, and how we listen and how we don’t. I’ve been trying to see a root cause for why we disagree so poorly at times, and I think there may be many reasons for it, but my heart kept being drawn back to one: Bible college and seminary coffee shop experiences.
When I look back to when I was in Bible college, and when I was still forming the fundamentals of what I believe Scripture to say, there were many conversations that were little more than what Matt Chandler calls “textual table tennis.” When debates were nothing more than me throwing out a verse to support Calvinism and another person throwing out a verse to counter my argument and it went back and forth for what seemed like hours. Some of this was good. Some of this served to strengthen my understanding of Scripture and do the same for the other person even if we disagreed in the end. But much of it was unhelpful. We were in an academic setting where we had to prove why we believed what we believed from Scripture, which is a good thing, but we weren’t always taught how to allow room for grace when someone disagreed. We wrote our papers and we gave our talks and shared our views, and when anyone disagreed with us we took it as a personal attack, and sometimes it was indeed phrased that way. Growing pains, to be sure.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade those experiences for the world. I wouldn’t trade the conversations or the friends made. I am definitely for Bible college and seminary. What I think becomes a problem is not only treating the Bible like a text book, but treating people like a professor. We have to prove our point to make the grade and we aren’t satisfied until the other agrees with us and gives us an “A,” all the while failing to realize that even our professors didn’t agree with us all the time but graded us on our ability to articulate and base beliefs in Scripture.
Sometimes those conversations built each other up and strengthened our faith and knowledge. But many times they served to harden our hearts against anyone who held a different view on Atonement or Eschatology or Ecclesiology, causing us to not only deconstruct the argument but the person making it as well.
Truth should be defended, absolutely. Scripture should indeed be wrestled with and prayed over until it’s understood. And I know the coffee shop textual table tennis conversations will be part of the Christian college and seminary experience for as long as those places exist, and to a degree I’m grateful for that because it shows that the students care enough about God and Scripture to work through problem passages or doctrinal questions in the context of community.
But seminaries aren’t training people to sit back and argue about Scripture while sipping a latte. They’re training pastors and shepherds and teachers first, and everything else has to come second. Yes, we need to keep teaching and learning Scripture as the foundation, but not for the sake of debating Scripture with each other, but for the sake of equipping the Church to reach the lost and love the broken. This absolutely includes deconstructing heresy and leading people to see where their Theology makes more of people than it does of Christ. While this should most often be done in the context of an established relationship and within a local church, it isn’t the end-all of ministry. We should care for and seek out and learn Truth because we need it to be effective ministers of the gospel, but if Truth doesn’t propel us toward love and grace as much or more than “being right” then we really need to check our hearts. Because I know I wasn’t the first person to make an idol out of truth, and I know I won’t be the last.
Whatever your view on gender roles, we need to remember everyone leads someone. We all shepherd someone, even if not in an official capacity. We may not even know we’re doing it. We may just be going about our daily lives unaware of being watched by those who look up to us. We may be home group leaders or parents or teachers or even good friends with a person. We need to focus on being pastoral as much as we focus on being Theogically accurate, maybe even more.
We can and should be thankful for those coffee shop conversations with people who enjoy those times, but we have to realize that this type of interaction may not be helpful for others. We have to realize that we don’t change the hearts and minds of men, only God does.
We aren’t seminarians. We’re pastors and shepherds and leaders and Christians. We don’t live in a world of cold academics, we live in a world of people with real thoughts and feelings and real questions.
Love without Truth isn’t love. Truth without love is damaging. We have to focus on both. We have to turn off the textual table tennis mentality and give grace to each other. We have to allow room for each other to be wrong, as God allows plenty of room for us to be wrong.
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