Impact 1: Trial and Error
This morning, I heard a speaker say "I have really grown in my theology over the last couple of years." In my mind, I re-interpreted that to mean "If you were listening to anything I said on this topic most of my life, I feel sorry for you." OK, I didn't really think that in the moment (I enjoy listening to the sermons), but it is, in fact, a logical consequence of what was said.
This speaker isn't alone. Famous evangelical pastors openly admit the same thing. Listen to the first 30 seconds of the video below by Francis Chan.
Here's what he said:
"Recently there has been a lot of discussion about hell. It's good because it caused me to restudy things what I've always believed about hell. And it's interesting because some of the things that I thought were so clear, they're really not that clear in scripture. And then there is [sic] other truths that I thought were , you know, questionable, and yet the more I study I go, wow, that's actually crystal clear."Again, they idea is: "Whoops, if you listened to what I was saying the rest of my life on the subject, ignore it, because now I think I've really got it."
You may remember Harold Camping. Twice he's predicted that the world would end. In both cases he was wrong. He was teaching about something enormously important - the end of the physical world, and he got it wrong. Time magazine had an article explaining what went wrong.
After a few days of silence — as thousands reveled in the fact that they hadn't been Raptured on Saturday — Judgment Day-calculator Harold Camping figured out a way to spin his (second!) failed prediction: it actually did happen, you just didn't see it. The 89-year-old Christian radio station owner explained on Monday night, during a Family Radio station broadcast, that rather than a physical Rapture taking place, the judgment was spiritual. But don't worry; the real end of the world is still ahead.So he twice switched his views after he realized what went wrong, both times admitting that the problem was that he was simply interpreting the Bible wrong. As a result, Christians and non-Christians alike ridiculed him. Check out the bill-board below.
Harold Camping was proved to be wrong about something incredibly important and as a result villified. But Christian teachers openly admit to the same thing. They may be teaching something exactly wrong about a topic about the potential end-of-your-soul (just as important as the end of the planet) and then they simply say "whoops, I got it wrong, but this time I've studied more and so I much more sure." In what significant ways are they different than Harold Camping?
You might say, "They don't pretend to be so sure of themsleves, Harold was telling people to give up their jobs etc." Well, yes and no. In one way, the pastors are demanding that Christians make themselves living sacrifices and they are asking them to do certain things because of what they teach. But there is a degree to which I think that most pastors do hedge their bets. They will not say for sure that what they are teaching is Christian. They will say "This is my interpretation, but other godly men and women take the exact opposite point of view."
Now the erudite will point out - if they don't know, they don't know. There's no use in pretending we know for sure what the scriptures mean. Well sure, but if you try and identify the sum total of what "you know" is true from the Bible (that no one else could possibly have a valid interpretation about) you will find it's the total amount of ideas is quite small.
But why is this? I would suggest that if everyone is responsible to interpret everything themselves this situation is inevitable. If we can't get together as a church and decide, in a binding way, how to interpret scripture we will be forever relegated to treating all of scripture in a 'hedging' way: we'll treat the ideas we form about it as 'our best guess' or we'll treat everyone else as heretics who lack common sense. Our pastors will simply be rhetoriticians trying to convince us of their position, rather than instructing us in truth we either accept or reject. Rather than having people go to church to be instructed in right ideas, we will have a smogsboard of denominations and people simply choose the one that they agree with (no submission to teaching contrary to my own personal opinions required!) We will feel free to switch our beliefs at any moment (leading to the inevitable conclusion that either those beliefs are not relevant to anything important, or that important things are left up to each individual to decide what they believe about).
