Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Story
The other day in my Christian History class, we were discussing the doctrine of the atonement. There were some interesting things, but by the end of our discussion, I felt like it was somewhat empty (if not of substance, at least of emotion). As I thought about it, I decided that one of the problems was that we were trying to reduce the atonement of Christ to doctrine. This is not necessarily a bad thing--I think doctrine is often undervalued in contemporary Christianity--but by so doing, we had pulled several aspects of that atonement out of their original context and attempted to analyze them "in a vacuum." Almost all of the scriptures are narratives, not explanations of doctrine--God did not reveal them in a vacuum, but intimately tied to people and stories. While I think we need to decide what the "moral" of these stories is (i.e. reduce them down to doctrine), I think we lose something in that reduction. In the end, Truth is not reducible down to neat list; it is embodied in Christ who is "the way, the truth and the life."
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My younger brother is currently a missionary in Minnesota. In one of his recent letters, he commented on this post, which I had sent to him. He said, "I am often annoyed by doctrine. I see things more poetically then most people. I know I do because most people don’t understand me. And I don’t understand most people. What is a stumbling block to many people's testimony doesn't affect me. My testimony isn't based on facts or figures or logic. I have decided that my testimony and ultimately everyone’s testimony is just as Elder Scott proposed, "not an emotion but our character woven by correct and righteous choices." The hardest and easiest lesson to teach is the atonement. Try to evoke the powerful feelings we have all felt in someone by explaining to them how the Son of God came down to satisfy the demands of some abstract justice so that we could have mercy somehow by taking upon himself the sins and pains of the world and then being tortured and killed--but he was resurrected and overcame death and hell....to people who understand it emotionally these explanations can be very powerful but to people who don’t it takes a story--a parable to covey the eternal truth of sacrifice. That is how the master taught anyways. Truth isn't so much learned but remembered. good stories have a hook that snags the memory and pulls to the surface the great relevance and understanding that swims beneath in the foggy surface of our conscious existence. there is a great pool of knowledge we already have but only access through the veil. Stories, experience, prayers, pondering, love all have a way of reaching through that veil. Then we take what we have learned through the veil and try and recreate that great ocean with a few drops of doctrine. That is why I can sometimes be annoyed by, as David put it, 'Doctrine.'"
ReplyDeleteDoctrine is the succinct explanations of the hard work of "Doing Theology". I totally agree. Doctrine cheapens it--and it is a very difficult thing to write--try writing doctrine sometime--putting God and his character/actions in a short paragraph. The point of "Doctrine" is not to explain the amazing things of God. "Doctrine" literature is not meant to be awe inspiring. Its function is to protect the message of the gospel. Theology (the way we think about God) is more juicy in its content.
ReplyDeleteDoctrine is necessary because it protects the church from heresy. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the church had to come up with doctrinal sayings--in order to define what the church believed because there were groups of people who said that Jesus was not fully human, or not fully God. So the church had to come up with an official statement that said, "God is both fully man and fully human." That statement is true but it is boring and not juicy. But the reality of that truth shaked the very foundations of this world. The Doctrinal literature of the church is to keep those who do proclaim the message on the right track--it is not meant to be the Sunday sermon, but to keep the Sunday sermon correct and on track. Does that make sense? I agree, it dries up the gospel and cheapens it--but it is a skill to learn how to work with doctrine, understand it, critique it, and then at the end of the day be able to still be just as passionate about the gospel as before. This is way many academics get a bad rap--because they spend so much time in their head they sometimes forget the overall meaning and message of the gospel. But a truly skillful academic would do the hard work of keeping the power of the message burning in his/her heart while doing theology. I think the way to protect ones self from letting doctrine become dry and dry one's faith is by realizing that everything we know about God is in a story. The story also protects us because we can never get away from our story either, so it is a constant check where we always relate the story of the Bible to our own. Now I'm just rambling...so I will stop.
I just finished reading C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces." At the end of the book, the main character, who has spent almost the whole book complaining against the Gods (the book is set in pre-Christian and pagan kingdom), has a vision in which she sees God. Her last words in the book are, "I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words."
ReplyDeleteI'm going way back in time but I love 'til we have faces. The title itself comes from the line that goes something like this: how can god meet us face to face,'til we have faces. So much truth is understood by living, by gaining a face. So perhaps the relativity in the universe is not so much the creation of the truth but the creation of our selves. We are relative to the truth rather than the truth being relative to us. Truth changes just like our lives change as we grow. What is a terrible experience can become glorious. Not because anything changed but we changed. CS Lewis also said, “That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”
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