Public Outbursts About Eugene Peterson and Jen Hatmaker Reveal Wider Christian Issues

Decades of Spoonfed Christianity Has Led to Knee-Jerk Reactions

We in the evangelical church are not teaching our people well. And so we do not trust them to venture into the actual world of ideas and discern. We overprotect them; we try to keep them in enclaves. But we don’t realize how counterproductive this is. And how impossible it is, honestly. Our people live in a world of swirling ideas, and there is no protecting them from different viewpoints and sources of knowledge as there was in times past. The Internet and globalization have made this true. There is no going back from this. What we have to do is equip our people to live peacefully alongside differing ideas, without feeling threatened, able to discern what accords with the historic faith from what does not.

Instead, our people are spoon-fed spiritual baby food and even bottle-fed spiritual milk, rather than growing up and growing in maturity and coming to eat food that is for adults.

In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.–Hebrews 5:12-14

We convert people with emotional altar calls that often don’t encourage them to count the cost of the faith into which they are entering and the commitment they are making. We do this even though Jesus did the exact opposite:

Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you,  saying, “This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.”–Luke 14:27-30

(And sometimes, we in traditional churches baptize people without talking with them or their parents seriously about their faith, without catechizing them in some way.)

After a rapid-fire, emotional conversion, we then often tell people to immediately go out and share a faith they don’t yet understand. In both traditional churches and megachurches, we tell people to come back each week to be spoon-fed again. And while small group Bible studies are offered, the leaders of the groups themselves are not always properly taught, particularly about historic Christianity. It is as if evangelical American Christianity dropped from the sky, rather than being part of a long, two-thousand-year tradition.

The Bible is taught, but in more modern churches it is not taught in harmony with the Creeds (Nicene and Apostles) and church history. There is an overreliance on the pastor’s interpretation of the Bible as the be-all and end-all. There gets to be more and more distance between the faith of the people in the seats and the historic faith. More and more it is communicated that what really, really matters in faith is an emotional connection to Jesus. Knowledge has to be communicated from the performer-in-chief (or the educated seminary graduate, in more traditional church settings), and the congregation remains reliant on a pastor to tell them right or wrong. When they face hard questions, they are easily thrown off balance and frequently told to “just believe” by other well-meaning Christians. This leads them back into a mindless reliance on the leader of the church, the guy or gal up front, or it leads them away from the church in despair. They are not taught to think theologically for themselves, to place their experience of faith within a larger historical context, to discern truth and error.

And now I get to how this relates to controversies like the Peterson/Hatmaker episodes: Because the congregation is not well equipped to discern truth from error, the powers that be react in a kneejerk way to articulations of unbiblical beliefs. They do not trust their congregations to sift the good from the bad, even when most of what the writer or leader teaches is worthwhile and valuable. It’s all or nothing. No in between. The congregation hasn’t given them the tools to discern. And so books must be removed from shelves, lest the faithful be confused–even when the specific books removed don’t advocate anything unbiblical. The mere association with someone who might have once said something or taught something the bookseller or church doesn’t agree with means they must be purged. At least LifeWay is willing to do this purging over more than just one issue, thereby decreasing the scapegoat effect, but the wider issue of not training people to discern truth from error in a myriad of matters holds true.

The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.–Matthew 13:20-23

We Reduce Complex Humans and Fellow Believers to One Issue

Look, I think beliefs about sexuality are very important. And obedience to God is necessary.

But I also think that when we publicly gang up on a Christian brother or sister in this one area regarding sexuality and ignore other matters where they are showing faithfulness to Christ, when we publicly castigate them, when we treat them as if they no longer matter to God or to us, when we shun them, when we label them in a way that is meant to put them in a convenient, judgmental box, we commit violence to the image of God in them. We treat them as an object, rather than a person. (And yes, I’ve been guilty of this too, lots of times.)

We may well grieve that our brother or sister in Christ is not obeying God in any number of areas. But we need to avoid bearing false witness, as well. We need to acknowledge the whole of their being. We need to humbly admit the areas in which they may be following God more faithfully than we are.

I wrote to Jen Hatmaker, whose writing has blessed my life in a number of ways, that even though I disagree with her on whether Christians should enter into a same-sex marriage, I have never doubted her love for Jesus and for others. No, I don’t agree with her position, but I believe she made it in good faith, honestly believing she was doing what was right. I think she even believes she has biblical basis for her belief. I think she’s wrong, but I know she loves the Lord.

To treat her almost like someone outside the faith because of this is not truthful or fair or loving. We must learn to stop our simplistic thinking. We must learn that we can care about, appreciate, and even learn from people who disagree with us on this matter or that matter.

The postmodern era, defined by the Internet and the endless availability of knowledge on any and every topic, has been a threatening and challenging development for a lot of Christians. The way we react when controversies of knowledge and belief emerge has a big effect on those around us–both believers and unbelievers. We can be those who wound or those who heal. We would do well to be careful to learn to respond with charity, with humility, and with a renewed determination to equip our fellow believers with the tools they need to view their beliefs through the lens of the historic faith.

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Image credit: Andrew Seaman, Grandma’s Bible, flickr. License here.