Not What We Believe, But How We Believe

Ellen Haroutunian recently posted a thought-provoking piece about the church’s subtle shift in the focus of our worship, how we have made an idol of orthodoxy rather than following the living Christ. Worth the time to read, but my mind has taken a rabbit trail on a few of her thoughts…particularly when she shares how easily tempers can flare when someone even suggests we have a problem in this area. Here’s a snippet from her post:

“It makes sense that if orthodoxy is our highest value, then to challenge even a bit of it will open the floodgates of wrath. And we are good westernized dualists so to challenge our idolatry of right belief is understood as leaving us with only wrong belief to employ. However, I don’t believe that it is our core beliefs that are the problem, nor do I desire to change a whole lot of what has been considered right belief for centuries (though there are plenty of points that should be open for more dialogue). The problem that we must face lies in how we think about these things.”

I truly relate to these remarks.

I have repeatedly said, both on the blog and in personal conversations, that my concerns for the church are less about doctrine and more about practice–a change in method, not an abandoning of principles. But to tell you the truth, it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I say this. All I have to do is start asking questions about the status quo, and I can watch people’s emotions start bubbling. Especially with ministry leaders. In some discussions, it has taken almost no time at all someone to get in my face, coming right up to the point of calling me a heretic without actually saying it. One guy actually asked me to recount the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ (apparently testing me to make sure I was still saved). And while these have not broken fellowship with me, some have said, in essence, that I need to be careful, that this kind of talk is a slippery slope. And these are folks who, if they’d just think about it, would remember that they are talking to a guy who is an absolute stickler about right doctrine!

At no time in these conversations have I ever challenged established doctrine, or tried to create a strange new one; that has never been the point. So why is the reaction the same as if I had truly spoken something heretical? It’s as though we have gotten so obsessed with right believing that even switching the lingo up a bit causes people to raise their eyebrows. Ellen has it right: challenging the church’s idolatry of right belief is immediately interpreted as an abandonment of right belief. And I think that is honestly a reaction of fear.

So where is the disconnect? I think Ellen has put it well: “The problem that we must face lies in how we think about these things.” Make no mistake: what we believe is important…but in the eyes of God it is not AS important as how we believe it. In other words…how we are living out the truth we have come to know.

Heresy has always been a problem for the church; from its earliest days, the apostles devoted plenty of time to correcting erroneous teachings and doctrines. But that does not mean this was the church’s main focus. We didn’t call this thing “Christianity” for many years; the early believers simply referred to this as “the WAY.” That alone should remind us that the primary focus of the early church was following the way of Christ, and sharing the good news about that Way–right living more than just right believing. Along the way, misconceptions about Jesus and the faith were addressed and dealt with; but the focus was decidedly on Jesus the Person, not doctrine for doctrine’s sake. Doctrine wasn’t the “First Love”; Jesus was.

It stands to reason that this would be the approach of the earliest believers, because the church was born out of Judaism and Hebraic thought. The Jews didn’t really care about speculating about the nuances of God’s existence; they described Him by how He interacted with them, by what He did. In their thinking, right living was the fruit of right believing, for how you walked on earth told everyone what you really believed. It was ultimately the influence of analytical Greek thinking that shifted the church from living out the way of Christ to philosophizing about the nature of Christ–from an action-based faith to a creed-based faith.

And this is what I think it means when we say the church has made an idol out of orthodoxy. We’re not saying we’ve had the doctrines all wrong; we’re just saying that in a subtle twist, the doctrines of the church have essentially supplanted Jesus rather than just pointed to Him. Thus, we’ve made it more important to believe the right thing than it is to follow the right Person. We We aren’t really as concerned about whether a person has a thriving relationship with the living God as we are that they have their doctrine straight.

You see, this isn’t an either/or thing; it’s both. It’s simply a matter of prioritizing, of making one thing subservient to the other. Sound doctrine is definitely a priority, but between sound doctrine and following Jesus the Person…following Jesus must take precedence, or doctrine becomes our idol. We do not serve doctrine; doctrine serves our faith in Christ.

I really see two problems inherent with switching these priorities and making “right belief” the top priority for our faith:

1. Nobody believes rightly. Nobody actually has this all “right.” Every one of us has some heresy floating around in our heads, because as the previous post has pointed out…our finite minds cannot fully grasp an infinite God. Yes, Scripture is there to describe Him, and Scripture should always be the baseline for our beliefs. But if you consider how many differing opinions can arise from one passage of Scripture, it’s obvious that we don’t have even our own doctrines down pat. So when we begin to exalt a certain set of beliefs or interpretations of Scripture, rather than center on Christ, it creates divisions among us, and isolates us from the world we’ve been left here to reach. Even Paul, who corrected a lot of heresy, repeatedly warns against these kinds of divisions and arguments about doctrine. An educated theologian himself, he once wrote: “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”

2. God is apparently not as concerned about being misunderstood as WE are about people misunderstanding Him. If you think about it, God has to live with the fact that nobody really “gets” Him, because we are virtually incapable of doing so–and the interesting thing is, He only attempts to correct those misconceptions a fraction of the times they occur. Jesus Himself is a great example of this: while many of the people believed He was destined to be a political leader to free Israel from the grasp of the Romans, Jesus didn’t waste time arguing with people about how wrong they were. He just was who He was, and walked in that reality, even allowing His own disciples to become disillusioned about Him. And He issued a simple call: “FOLLOW ME.” I don’t think He did it this way because He didn’t care about people’s misconceptions; I think He did it because following Him was the best way to clear up those misconceptions. Again, it’s a matter of priorities. God doesn’t want us just to believe the right things about Him; He wants to be known.

A few weeks ago, the author of The Shack (a book I still haven’t read yet) came to our town on a speaking tour, and a lady who works with me at the flower shop went to see him. This woman doesn’t convey the traditional image of a “Christian”, though she comes from a Presbyterian background; but she couldn’t contain her excitement over the lecture, and the book itself, which she had read several times. I could hardly get in the van to deliver the flowers because she kept on talking.

I’m aware that The Shack has offended some Christians’ sensibilities because of God’s appearance at one point as a black woman. I’m aware that although Scripture makes it clear God has both male and female traits, the pronoun “He” is always used to describe Him, and I have no desire to challenge that point in Scripture. I understand the concerns some have that this idea might promote some heretical thinking; and you know–the woman talking to me had some clear misconceptions about God. But she was talking about God, and that hadn’t happened before. There was a day when I would have been more concerned about correcting her errors than celebrating her hunger–and had I done so, I know she would have simply classified me with the rest of the religious Christians that had alienated her, and that would have been the end of it. But I felt the nudge of the Spirit not to major on the minors, that if her hunger caused her to follow after Him, He was fully capable of correcting any wrong ideas she currently has about Him.

So here’s the crux of all this rambling. Like Ellen, I don’t seek to challenge the established doctrines of our faith, although some definitely deserve more dialogue. But I also realize that what a person really believes will play out in how that person lives, and this is consistently re-emphasized in Scripture. This isn’t about forsaking sound doctrine; it’s about removing it from its place of idolatry. This was not supposed to be a creed as much as it was supposed to be a path…a WAY. And this is where our focus needs to shift. It isn’t a plunge into heresy to shift focus this way, because it isn’t changing what we believe, but how we approach that belief, and how we live it. It simply means we trust God with His own truth, instead of fancying ourselves to be the guardians of it.

As if.

After all…truth is not actually a set of beliefs. Truth is a Person we are supposed to be following. (Jn. 14:6)