Of Books and Bibles

Today I finished a book about a theological foundation for the church.  It's one of those books that once upon a time I would have absolutely loved for its eye-opening view of the church.  About 20-25 years ago, as I began ministry, there were a lot of these new viewpoints of Churches of Christ that ended up in print.  I have many of them on my shelf...a few are excellent, most are ordinary, and a few are terrible.  I also own some of the counter-reactions to this written by those who were terrified at the thought of change.  A few were well-reasoned and helpful but most were simply fearful rants about 'change agents'. 

As I get older and have now spent almost 24 years in full time ministry, though, these kind of books just don't appeal to me anymore.  Maybe it's that absorbed their content so fully that they don't have anything to say to me. But I think that the more likely answer is that I now am more interested in reading the Bible again.  Perhaps these books pushed me back to being more Biblical, and if so thank you, but I am more and more fascinated with what a two-millennia-old collection of Hebrew and Greek texts has to say about the church and about God and about my own faith and about the reality of the world around me than I am about what non-inspired people have to say on just about anything. 

Not sure exactly how I came this way, but I love the Bible so much more than I used to.  I used to think of it as something I had to read as a good Christian, and something I had to mine as to be a competent preacher.  Do I read the Bible more than I used to?  Not really...right now I am doing a daily Bible reading program on my app, and I'm not preaching any more exegetically than I used to (I've always depended upon thru-the-Bible to set up most of my preaching).  But the Bible seems now more alive to me than it ever did before. 

I'm sure if I was to forensically examine this, I could give great thanks to many good Bible teachers I've had in the past, or books that have pointed me in the right direction.  But I wonder if the real gamechanger was when I started to take the Psalms and the Prophets more seriously.  That happened around the same time, not long after we moved here 13 years ago.  They are Scripture, but they are a very different kind of Scripture...not law, not story, but rather poetry and prophetic correction.  I always thought of Scripture in terms of those first two, but even though other poetry interests me not at all, and prophetic correction even now can seem a bit overbearing, I think pulling these into my frame of mind has given me the closest hope of grasping the totality of God's story as I have been able to get.  It's still not complete, of course, but no longer do I look at Scripture and just sigh and think that it's too big, too inaccessible. 

Theology and Christian Doctrine

Years ago when I went to one of our Church of Christ universities I was informed that instead of taking a class in theology, ministry students would be taking courses in systematic doctrine.  For years, decades even, I didn't even think about it, thinking that this was just an argument over semantics. 

As I have gotten older, I have started to see how wrong I was.  The very name 'theology' tells us that one is studying about God...his nature, his attributes, his actions.  But my experience through the years is that systematic doctrine in Churches of Christ is a very different thing.  Rather than speak of God in terms of theology, most of that time is spent on ecclesiology, which is about the study of the church.  Thus rather than speak of the creator, we spend much of our time discussing the minutiae of the church...its organization, its leadership, its actions.  This, I have discovered, is a very different thing than speaking about God. 

I guess I should not be surprised.  Far too often in Churches of Christ we have spent our time navel-gazing and criticizing other groups not so much for what they believe about God (since, in many ways, we didn't know about the nature of God ourselves), but rather about what the church does.  I understand that theology (and christology and pneumatology) can become matters of speculation that really lead us nowhere.  But the more that I study Scripture, the more I realize that unless God is considered (and glorified and honored), all the rest doesn't matter. 

Reading the 10 commandments, one doesn't begin with 'thou shalts'.  Rather, it begins with "I am the Lord your God...".  Christian faith, likewise, is not so much about an ethic as it is about a relationship with God and a discipleship with Jesus as our Lord.  To overlook this and consider it as a given, and run instead towards what we do in the church, is to miss much of the point of what it is that we believe.  Faith is not about our own actions; it is rather faith in the Creator, Redeemer, and Advocate. 

Lord, forgive us for forgetting about YOU.