Some Thoughts on Confirmation

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

One of the common features of confirmation classes is to have the confirmands produce a creed – a statement of belief. After going through several weeks – or months – of study, they write a Credo.

I have seen other churches that do it differently. When a person – young or old – is baptized or joins the church, they give a testimony of the work of God in their life, and how they came to faith.

The production of a creed aims at the intellect, the production of a testimony at the heart, or at one’s experience. Modernity has developed habits of dichotomizing knowledge and experience, and I think this is one area we can see the dichotomy: the approach is either intellectual or experiential.

My question: Is there a way to do both?

  1. I want my children – and as a leader, the children of others – to have a clear experience of God in their lives. I want them to experience a “heart strangely warmed,” exercise their wills in giving their lives to Christ, and be filled with the Holy Spirit. Apart from this kind of experience, I do not think they will have the motivation to live as Christians for very long.

  2. I also want children to develop a biblical and theological language to understand the work of God – in the world, in history, in the church, in their own lives.

  3. As we focus on these dual objectives, experience and understanding, people (this will be true of adults as well as children) will grow in their ability to interpret their lives as part of God’s continuing action in history. They will learn to see their purpose and significance as based not merely on themselves (which can be easily thwarted by a knowledge of their sin and failure), but on the stubborn and active love of God that incorporates them into something bigger than themselves (the Kingdom of God).

  4. In the beginning, an emphasis on Christian experience was the major factor differentiating Methodists from others in the Church of England. John Wesley, however, embodied an approach that kept the experiential and the intellectual tied together. In the past century, however, Methodists have lost the connection to Christian experience for two reasons. First, we have succumbed to the modern notion that experience is essentially and primarily individual and private. Second, we have turned from the usage of language drawn from scripture and tradition to articulate our experience. For the most part we have ceded “saved” language to other groups (like the Baptists).

  5. Because we tend to see experience as personal and private, we are uncomfortable talking about it. Yet it is in talking about if for ourselves that our children (and other adults) come to have the experience. Contrary to much of modernity, knowledge, language and experience are hopelessly intertwined.

  6. We need to recover a robust language of experience from scripture and tradition so our children can have the language and concepts to have the experience of being forgiven, saved, redeemed, sanctified, filled with the Spirit, etc.

  7. This language needs to be explicitly connected with the narrative of scripture and not reduced to psychological or sociological categories. “Gaining self esteem” or “a new outlook on life” are good things – they may even be by-products of Christian experience. But if those kinds of experiences are all we offer, we are missing out on the best God has to offer.

What do you think of this?

Posted in Confirmation, Evangelism, Youth Ministry | 3 Comments

The Market

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

Isn’t the market doing great?

Yesterday morning when I left town, the price of gas was 3.23. By the time I got home (about 6 pm) it was down to 3.16. When I went out this morning (about 9am), it was down to 3.08. Just now (1:20) it is down to 3.04. Down about 6% in just over a day!

What action should I take in the face of this plunging market? Well, in the case of gas, I’m dealing with a commodity that I will need again before too long. Right now my tank is just under a half so I don’t need any gas. Besides, if I went and bought now, how would I feel if tomorrow it’s down to 2.99? Sure, if I bought ten gallons I’d only be spending an extra fifty cents by buying now. But haven’t you ever groused over missing a deal like that? The way the market is acting now is training me to expect it to go down further. Will it? Probably – I saw gas for 2.89 in Sulphur Springs yesterday – but I have no guarantee. I know it won’t reach the place where they just give it away. It has in intrinsic value – at least in our culture, given our network of transportation methods and practices – so it’ll continue to be worth something.

But that’s not the market most of us are concerned about, is it? We watch the stock market – the vehicle transporting much of the resources for our retirements and savings – going down. We don’t see ourselves as the consumers here – we’re the sellers – or at least we imagine ourselves to be. IF I need to sell my stocks now, to find my education, retirement, trip to Europe, etc., then I want to be able to sell for a high price; at least higher than I bought in at.

If I were a buyer of stocks, I’d be standing on the sidelines asking something like, “How far down is it going? When will it be low enough that I ought to buy some?” Unlike gasoline, we don’t have a “stock tank” that will run empty if we don’t fill up at regular intervals. We might also get the idea that stocks are of no real value – or are simply too unpredictable for us to risk. On the other hand, we might be able to take ourselves out of the fear and panic all around us and recognize that at least some parts of the market do retain value, and might, in fact, be currently undervalued.

Stocks don’t have the same kind intrinsic value that gasoline does. They can decline in value to the point that they’re only valuable as wall paper or kindling. But, like gasoline, they have the value they do through the network of economic practices of our culture. We decide that they have value. In that sense, market valuations are subjective. Sure, we develop formulas and equations to express or compute those values, but that layer of objectivity is laid on top of our subjective valuations.

Our economies crash when we value things wrongly. Supposedly the spur behind the current crash was an overvaluing of real estate. We valued it so much that we were willing to pile up huge debts to acquire it.

Once upon a time Jesus said the Kingdom of God was like a man who found a treasure in a field. He valued that treasure so much that he sold everything he had so he could buy that field and gain that treasure. When Jesus told that story he was surrounded (as are we) by people who were valuing the wrong things, or wrongly valuing the right things.

I’d like to be able to retire someday. I’d like to own my own home someday. I’d like to be able to get my children through college. Because I value these things, I value my participation in the economy. I want my investments to do well.  But I’m not staking my life on them. I know that even the surest of them (after all, we buy gas, with its intrinsic value, to burn it!) can only bear so much weight. They’re not lasting. I’m putting my primary trust in God and God’s promises, rather than the market.  When the market fails (even if it turns around soon and happy days are here again, it will fail again in the future) I’m unhappy – for myself and for the other people who suffer from it. But I’m not lost. I’m not all-in for the market. But I am all in for Jesus.

Posted in Economics, Market, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Crunchy or Soggy?

Posted on October 7, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

Glenn Reynolds makes this observation about the call for greater regulation in financial markets:

There is an argument, instead, for crunchy systems where problems are immediately obvious, instead of “soggy” ones where they are not. Regulation, etc., tends to make systems more soggy — which is good for you when FDIC insurance protects your savings, but bad for the system when FDIC insurance makes you not care about your bank’s balance sheet or loan portfolio.

A complexity is that even when we know there is a problem it doesn’t mean we know what to do about it. Our bodies seem more crunchy than soggy in this respect, and the easy availability of health care for the slightest perceived difficulty has had some negative consequences. The root solution seems to be more education so that we can learn to recognize and evaluate symptoms, as well as determining possible wise courses of action.

Such an education would not be merely in content – how to recognize bubbles, how to tell when a pitchman for a particular investment is telling the truth, how to evaluate companies or the prospects of various commodities – but also in attitude. If we hear, “The market lost 10% of its value today,” how ought we to feel? Should we panic? Should we rejoice because we now have a buying opportunity?

Surely a recognition of the need for more education is no quick fix – if it’s even possible. Perhaps the least we could hope for is education for some of our leaders. What would it look like if congress and the rest of the political class didn’t go off the deep end (“Institution X is about to fail!” “The other party has put us in such a mess I don’t think we can recover apart from drastic measures!”). Sometimes the utterances we hear when they go off the deep end are factually accurate, but the rhetorical strategy employed creates more panic than calm. My perception is that people more usually do the right thing when they’re calm than when they’re panicked.

Posted in Current events, Economics | Leave a comment

A Problem of Trust

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

By the time you read this, at least a week will have passed. I don’t know what the markets will do between now and then. Like the rest of you, I know that most of our investments have gone down quite a bit his year. I know that my pension fund has gone down several thousand dollars. I figure many of you are in a similar place – though perhaps more stressed about it since you’re closer to (or in) retirement.

Trust is what makes our economy work. We trust people to pay us for goods or services rendered. We trust our banks to manage our money wisely so that it’ll be there when we need it.

If you don’t remember back to your grade school days, I can remind you that banks don’t keep all our money right there in their vault. They loan it – put it to work – to earn more money. That’s a good thing. That’s how we buy things we can’t afford right now (or ever, under normal circumstances) like houses, cars, and sanctuary renovations. When people lose their trust in their bank, they go to withdraw their money. But when everyone (or a large subset thereof) does it at the same time, they discover that the bank can’t give them their money. Remember: It’s not just sitting there in their vault, it’s out working. That action following a failure of trust is called a bank run. That’s what’s has helped bring down some of the big banks that have fallen.

The mysterious thing is that sometimes our trust is only correct when we actually trust. If we all trust in our banks, for example, they are more likely to prove trustworthy. We are, in effect, trusting our neighbors, who, like us, may be in the process of paying off money – our money – loaned to them by our bank. I don’t class myself among the “positive thinking” crowd, but I do think that thinking positively about something, whether it be the economy, our church, the people around us, tends to produce better results than negative thinking. If our actions were only based on facts, it might not be that way. But in the real world our actions are based on our perception of facts and our attitudes toward those facts.

Sometimes we discover that our trust is misplaced. We’ve trusted the wrong thing. I see that today. We’ve trusted that real estate is a safe investment that will only and always go up in value. Oops. We’ve trusted that it’s safe to carry lots of mortgage and consumer debt. Oops. We’ve trusted that having lots of stuff will bring us joy and security. Oops.

My absolute, unconditional trust is in the Lord who defeated the powers of sin, death and hell in the life death and resurrection of Jesus. He won’t fail me. I have relative trust in the financial institutions of society. They usually seem to work, but sometimes break down. Run as they are by sinful people (for sinful people), we shouldn’t be surprised. So whether happy days are here again or the world is crashing down around me, my trust is in God. Where’s your trust?

Posted in Economics | Leave a comment

Thinking in the background

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

As one of the consequences of having a short attention span, I tend to be reading several (non-fiction) books at a time. Two books I’m reading now are Bruce Ellis Benson’s Graven IdeologiesL Nietzsche, Derrida & Marion on Modern Idolatry and Kenton L. Sparks’ God’s Word in Human Words. Since the latter is an ILL book and I’m pressed for time, I’m not able to read it as closely as I’d like. (I read ILL books (a) because books are expensive, (b) I’ve run out of bookshelf space. This way I can “test-drive” a book and evaluate it for future purchase.)

One of the features of phenomenology (the philosophical context of Benson’s work) is a feature of the essential role of background in human acts of interpretation and understanding. Various theological and philosophical phenomenologists take different stances toward the background, but all address it.

Sparks doesn’t engage in great detail with the tradition of thought covered by Benson (he includes a small section on postmodern hermeneutics), the same issues are relevant nonetheless. Sparks’ objective is to accommodate biblical criticism (broadly conceived) within a high (even inerrantist) view of scripture. In his discussion of general and special revelation he says:

If it is true that the meaning of God’s written word depends so much on the larger context in which it was written and subsists, then it stands to reason that the best interpretations of Scripture will be those that best understand that larger context – the created order. This will mean, for instance, that the best readings of the early chapters of Genesis will be from scholars who are informed not only about theology and the nuances of ancient Israelite literature but also about matters of modern science and cosmology. The whole of the created order, including the whole of human observations and theories about it, provides the ideal context for biblical interpretation. If this is so, then it would seem that in some respect God’s divine speech in creation precedes his written words, for creation is the larger context that makes his written words intelligible. It is not only the Bible but also creation itself that speaks a “word” from God. This assertion not only makes reasonable sense but is also given biblical expression [Psalm 19:1-6]… Surely it is metaphor to describe the created order as ‘word,’ but the metaphor is not so different from what makes Jesus Christ ‘the Word.’ Creation speaks God’s ‘word,’ and its ‘voice’ is heard by all humanity. Implicit in this theology of creation is that the created order was made to be known; it discloses itself to us. In this sense, all that we come to know through the created order can be understood as revealed truth. Readers may know that this line of thought brings us inexorably to the sticky matter of natural revelation and natural theology. How much theology can human beings known apart from God’s special revelation in the written Bible and the incarnate Son? (p.264-5)

I find this quote very provocative  – in the sense that it provokes much thought on my part. My initial evaluation is that Sparks seems to jump to quickly from Creation as an act (or speech act) of God to taking the complete world of human experience as an act (or speech act) of God. I do not take every act within my experience, whether I experience them directly or indirectly, as an act of God. Surely within the horizon of my interpretive experience (my experience has horizons – I don’t experience everything), some of what I experience I can take as act (speech act) of God. But only some. Other parts of my experience are clearly acts of humans.

But can an act of a human be accurately described as also an act of God? Can God act through human actions? Reading the bible I’d have to answer affirmatively. But I’m also inclined to deny universality here. Not every human act is best described as also an act of God. There are some human acts (some of which we’d call “sins”) that are best described as purely human acts.

So part of the background of understanding the word of God in the bible is the word of God we find in creation. I also don’t have any trouble saying that because of the humanity of the bible (it’s obviously a book about and for humans), the human background is also essential to consider in interpreting Scripture.

Posted in Bible, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology | Leave a comment

Trends in American Preaching

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

Here’s the first report on some of what Tom Long had to say at a Baylor preaching convocation earlier in the week.

The narrative style of preaching, which arose in the early 1960s with the demise of the didactic style and reached it pinnacle (in terms of theorists of preaching) in people like Fred Craddock, appears to be on the way out. Long says that the narrative style is being attacked from multiple directions.

The critique from the “right” say that narrative preachign isn’t strong enough on doctrine and doesn’t build either individual faith or the church adequately. (If doctrine has to be atomistic assertive propositions, then I’d probabaly agree with that critique. But I think that doctrine is more than mere truth claims and has a necessary narratival dimension that can be  strengthened with a narrative style of presentation.)

Long says the critique from the “center” – he has people like Charles Campbell (Preaching Jesus) in mind – sees a turn away from the stories of Jesus to stories about grandmothers and other characters. Though grandma’s story may connect to the story of Jesus in the mind of the preacher, the level of background biblical knowledge in most congregations is insufficient for the style to work any more.

Critics from the “left” – he thinks of people like John McClure – charge that the narrative style is not only irrelevant, but is also an abuse of power by imposing an implicit metanarrative on to the audience.

Finally, Long mentions a critique coming from philosophy in the person of Galen Strawson (Against Narrativity).  I haven’t read Strawson yet, so I can’t comment on his work in depth, but the way Long describes him, he comes across as a Humean (or Buddhist “no self”?), arguing that only the present matters. Narrative wrongly presents the story of a human life when all we have are episodes in the present tense.

While Long thinks rejection of narrativity to be a mistake (as do I), he does recognize that people in our audiences do tend to be more episodic in their self-understanding. Preachers who have picked up on this and developed a style that communicates well with that kind of audience include (according to Long) Adam Hamilton and Rick Warren.

Long then argued for what he called a “chastened use” of narrativity. This takes three forms.

  • Narratives become “dress rehearsals” for skills all Christians need. Preachers don’t settle for just telling people what needs to be done nor telling them how to do it. They provide examples.
  • Stories also become part of the “congregational canon,” the collection of stories told over and over in a congregation as they seek to understand themselves and model their response to God.
  • By telling stories, the preacher can give a “voice to the voiceless,” telling the stories of those who cannot tell their own.
Posted in Preaching, Thomas Long | Leave a comment

Unity & Harmony

Posted on September 27, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

On page 30 of Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard says,

When successful, spiritual formation (or, really, reformation) unites the divided heart and life of the individual. That person can then bring remarkable harmony into the groups where he or she participates.

The first thing that comes to mind when I read this is Psalm 86:11, “Teach me your way, O LORD, and I will walk in your truth; Give me an undivided heart, that I might fear your name.” God seeks to make our heart one – to bring us unity and harmony on the inside. I know too well that I don’t always have that oneness of heart. My heart tugs me in different directions at the same time. Sometimes the forces seem to strong and so opposite each other that I imagine horses tied to my extremities, pulling with all their might. I year for the day God unifies my heart.

But as I think further, I see that it is a good thing our human hearts are not often united. A single heart, a heart focused truly on one thing, can be a powerful force. But a force for what? A force working toward what end?

At the Tower of Babel, God saw unity and harmony – world peace, some would call it. And God didn’t think it was a good thing because it was unity around the wrong thing, harmony in pursuit of an evil end. Seeing that unity, that harmony, God stepped in and brought confusion. We can read the confusion as a sign of judgment. I choose to see it as a sign of God’s mercy. Rather than let the people plunge headlong into destruction, God mercifully defocused them.

I believe God exercises similar mercy with us today. We’ve seen enough evil in our world to have some idea how much greater that evil would have been if the perpetrators had been truly single minded in their competency and focus. While we sometimes decry the problems caused by the good being distracted by the bad, evil or unimportant, we might forget that some problems are mitigated – or even eliminated – because the evil is distracted by the good or indifferent.

Though unity of heart and harmony of group are amoral in themselves, God seeks more. We see in Psalm 86 that what God is seeking is not mere unity of heart, but a unity of heart submitted to him, a unity of heart formed and fed in the context of worship and dependance on God.

Posted in Spirituality | 1 Comment

Urgent!

Posted on September 26, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

I’m noticing a lot of urgent things in my life lately.

It’s urgent that I have all the meetings and prepare all the reports for Charge Conference.

It’s urgent that we promise billions and billions to bail out the mistakes people have made in our economy.

It’s urgent that we send money, supplies and people to do Ike recovery.

Our major regional employer is in urgent times.

It’s urgent that we pay attention to the presidential election.

I’m sure there are other urgent items out there, but beyond more local issues, I just can’t remember them.

There are some who would say responding to all these urgent demands is Kingdom work. While responding to all these needs is good and can be an act of love, I am unwilling to reduce Kingdom work to hopping around like mad meeting needs.

So tell me – am I hard hearted – or maybe just tired?

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

How God Knows

Posted on September 12, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

I’m sympathetic with some of the Open Theism literature I’ve read, so I find Greg Boyd’s comments on a confused theory of knowledge inherited from the ancients interesting. His conclusion seems reasonable.

Once we abandon the ancient view of seeing and knowing as active processes, it becomes clear that God’s knowledge is perfect if, and only if , it perfectly conforms to the nature of what is known. So if possibilities are real, then God’s knowledge is perfect if, and only if, God knows them as possibilities. Contrary to what Roy and Erickson claim, open theists affirm that God always knows everything perfectly. It’s just that we have reason to believe a partly open future is part of what God perfectly knows.

But I don’t think I want to jump so quickly to the conclusion that I (we humans) can understand God’s ways of knowing and relating to the events of time so easily.

The ancient mistake, stemming from Plato, was that seeing, and knowing, based as it is on seeing, is an active process. Boyd explain,

Plato argued that we see not by light entering our eyes (as we now know is the case) but by light proceeding out of our eyes (Timaeus 45b). For Plato, seeing is an active, not a passive, process. Since knowledge was considered to be a kind of seeing, Plato also construed knowing as acting on something rather than being acted upon (Sophist 248-49). I’ve discovered that this mistaken view of seeing and knowing is picked up and defended by a host of Hellenistic philosophers. (As an aside, Jesus seems to have capitalized on this mistaken view of eyesight to illustrate a point [Mt 6:22; Lk 11:34]).

So let’s imagine Plato is wrong. Seeing – and knowing – is not a purely active process.  Is it then passive? Boyd doesn’t say it is, but in spite of a qualification – when the wrong way is described as “wholly active,” one retains the possibility of being “partially” active.

Difficulty comes in the fact that seeing, perceiving and knowing is not ever simply seeing, perceiving, and knowing – at least not when it matters to us. We see as, we perceive as, and we know as. Our knowledge – and perhaps God’s knowledge – becomes functional for us when we can make it intelligible, i.e., fit it into a context where that which we see/perceive/know can make sense. This ability to see or know as strikes me as an active process of engaging with the larger contexts of our experience. I have no trouble saying that God’s knowledge and perception of these contexts is just like God’s knowledge and perception of anything else: perfect.

Is God’s knowledge therefore causative, as some of Plato’s heirs thought? No, I think Boyd is right here. God knows the possible actions of free agents.  Of course, being a free agent, God is able to determine events by means of action.

Posted in Epistemology, God, Greg Boyd | Leave a comment

Another, older, NCLB

Posted on September 1, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) considers the depth of Reform in the middle ages to be much greater than the line from Wycliffe, to Huss, to Luther and beyond, connecting it to the rise of the modern preoccupation with “ordinary life” (a major feature of his last bog book, Sources of the Self):

The thrust of Reform was to make  Church in which everyone should show the same degree of personal commitment and devotion which had hitherto been the stance of a dedicated elite. This would be a Church in which all genuine members (excluding the damned) should strive integrally to fulfill the Gospel. To carry through on this Reform required that one define a way of life open to everyone which would amount to such an integral fulfillment; and this couldn’t help but bring about a definition of the demands of Christian faith closer into line with what is attainable in this world, with what can be realized in history. The distance between the ultimate City of God and the properly Christian-conforming earthly one has to be reduced.

In both Christianity and modern American education, we have high goals. We find ourselves in conflict: Our theory says that these goals are for everyone, yet reality keeps telling us that many – if not most – are not reaching the level our theory says they ought to reach. What are we to do?

The solution of the movement Taylor calls “Reform,” just as in current NCLB legislation is to push higher levels of discipline and accountability. Try harder, rationalize the process more.

But then we discover that even with higher levels of discipline, with greater rationality applied to our systems, people still aren’t measuring up to our theories. Since we’re held accountable for making reality come into line with our theories, we have to do something. So we take the logical next step: We lower the ideal. “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.” “Let’s focus on minimum standards all the time for everyone (i.e., teach the TAKS), so that all students will be successful.”

Posted in Charles Taylor, Education, Public Schools, Spirituality, Theology | 2 Comments