I was recently posed this question by a mentor: “Does the illiteracy of the church render a truth irrelevant or the church irrelevant?”
The Gospel transcends time. Its relevance penetrates the soul and in its beautiful irony it puts all other ideologies to shame. And yet God chose the church as his agent of truth. 1 Timothy 3:15 honors us while obliging us to something. We’re called the pillar of truth–that ancient architectural element that supports structures. We the church are commissioned to be the foundation that upholds, honors, and leads the way in the truth enterprise. It seems the Gospel message has been entrusted to a people who are less than perfect and who are notorious for being lazy in our evangelism and missions, i.e. keeping God ourselves. And still our greatest mistake may soon come to be not our inactivity but our complacency in how we view God. I consider that the Gospel message will suffer most when the church has a lesser view of God than rightfully belongs to him. Here’s the unpacking: we think we can fully wrap our minds around an infinite God who is wholly different from us. Furthermore, we bind him in paradigm that lets us sit back in comfort as we think to ourselves, “Ah yes, we’ve sorted this matter out. Nothing further.” Confessions, creeds, and theologies of a different era are mistakenly considered sufficient for engaging our world today, and our teachers crouch behind systematic theologies that are thought to settle the score once and for all.
We think the world isn’t worth exploring and that it has nothing to tell us about God, even though Scripture clearly tells us otherwise (Rom. 1:19-20). We cower in fear as the “secular disciplines” rear their ugly heads. Sociology, anthropology, psychology and the like are changing the way people understand the world because they reveal so much about who we are. So it makes sense that something like anthropology and theology proper should be in constant conversation. The design says much about the designer! The more we understand ourselves and the world we live in, the more we should understand God. The Gospel message suffers when theology doesn’t keep up. The Gospel message suffers when the church retreats instead of engaging.
We live in the Information Age—an age of specialization, where Masters degrees are becoming the norm for landing a job. The young adult freshly graduated from college can often stump the middle-aged believer with her simple palette of dilemmas she learned in certain 101 classes. Part of the reason is because the church has created a ghetto for itself, one based on a misunderstanding of what it means to be a people of faith. And this happens in Christian academia as well, largely due to the problem of fear or slippery slope arguments.
What I’m submitting is that the popular understanding of sola Scriptura is not enough (and itself not found in Scripture). A contextual study of Luther’s circumstances will reveal he never intended it to be so narrowly understood either. He demanded that Canon Law be considered null in the soteriological debates of the time because the truth taught in the Bible and stood in clear contrast to it. For us today, while Scripture should remain primary in our theological method, it is a naive myth to think it is the sole source for our theology. Our assumptions influence our worldviews so much that when honed properly and submitted to the primacy of Scripture, the scientific disciplines can help us ferret out our presuppositions and offer context, clarity, and correction to our beliefs. When an apparent contradiction between our sources surfaces, it is due either to our misunderstanding of a particular Bible passage or to our misunderstanding of nature.
We render ourselves irrelevant when we become illiterate. Let us engage the developments of the secular sciences. Let us be learned. Let us not so narrowly understand the gift of Scripture that we miss the beauty and usefulness of God’s general revelation.
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