Being biblical or doing what works (part 1): Do we have to choose?

In this first part of a two part article, we ask how you can know whether your life and ministry are genuinely biblical. Is it method? Is it results? Is it some kind of warm feeling of assurance? Do we in fact need to look to the Bible to work out how to conduct ministry, or is it an area where pragmatic thinking is our best tool?

Part 1

While putting the finishing touches to this article, my eyes lit upon the following banner in a Christian magazine: “Double Your Class & Disciplemaking Teachers Conference”.

Being always interested in obtaining more class, I read on to discover (with some disappointment) that what was on offer was a conference at which delegates could discover how to double the numbers of people in their Bible class. The main attraction was an international speaker, webmaster and independent consultant named Josh Hunt, author of You Can Double Your Class in Two Years or Less, who as a Baptist pastor had trebled the attendance at his last church. In a sidebar came recommendations from a venerable trinity of church growth gurus: Rick Warren, John Maxwell and Lyle Schaller.

How could anyone resist?

More interesting for me was the question: How could anyone discern whether this package was a helpful one for Christian ministry or not? How does one decide these things?

How, for that matter, do we assess all the other packages, models, techniques and programs that vie for our attention in the church growth supermarket? Which one of them, if any, will be the answer for us? Should we make our pilgrimage to Bill Hybels at Willow Creek, or Rick Warren at Saddleback? What about the Cursillo or Emmaus Walk approach? Then there’s Alpha, Christianity Explained, Evangelism Explosion and all the rest. Not to mention, of course, Matthias Media.

Everyone has a package, an approach, a methodology. Everyone has the answer for You. This, of course, not only applies to church programs but also to solutions for individual Christians in our daily walks—whether it’s Neil T. Anderson and his bondagebreaking path to personal healing and power, or Dr Reginald Cherry and his prescriptions for healthy living.

To make it even harder to choose, every package or approach has strengths and things to recommend it; each has devotees and testimonials of changed lives; each claims to have worked in practice; and each, of course, claims to be ‘biblical’.

Ah yes, biblical. Everyone has to be biblical. We all await the day when a new Christian book has plastered on the cover: “Never mind the Bible, this just works!“. In the meantime, we face the challenging task of working out just what it means for any approach or teaching or method to be ‘biblical’, for such they all claim to be.

What does the word ‘biblical’ actually mean? To pick an example at random, if Rick Warren claims that his philosophy of the ‘purpose-driven church’ is ‘Bible-based’ or ‘biblical’, what does that signify? Does it mean that Mr Warren derived the whole thing from meditation on the Scriptures, that it all sprang out of his Bible reading; or is it something he really came up with from elsewhere (e.g. common sense or modern management techniques) and for which he then found some biblical support? If the latter, is there anything wrong with that? Are we to be limited only to that which is positively commanded or mandated in Scripture, such that, like the Amish, we regard motor cars and pipe organs as works of the Devil?

Here then is our dilemma (and the subject of this two-part article): We want to do what works; and yet we also wish to be ‘biblical’. Are the two really in conflict? How are they to be reconciled? Is it possible to be genuinely biblical and yet to gain insights from the techniques of the world (such as current theory about leadership or management or personal improvement)? Or to put it all another way: How are we to ground our lives and ministries in the Bible?

These are big questions, and we will doubtless fail to solve them entirely in this short space. However, let us begin our enquiry by thinking about the very idea of ‘doing what works’, that is, pragmatism.

Pragmatism and the Bible

Pragmatism has a bad name these days. It exists in sentences like “Well I know in theory we should do X, but being pragmatic about it we are going to have to settle for Y”. To be pragmatic is to sell out one’s principles and follow the ugly path of utility.

However, there are good theological reasons to be pragmatic. God has created an orderly world, which he constantly upholds and sustains in a reliable and orderly way by his powerful word. Precisely because the world is the contingent creation of a good, rational and powerful God, it is a place where you can work things out by seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Some situations or courses of action just work out better in this world, because of the way God has created it. Proverbs is full of these sorts of observations about life:

Better a meal of vegetables where there is love than a fattened calf withhatred. (Proverbs 15:17).

He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm. (Proverbs 13:20).

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. (Proverbs 15:1).

Finish your outdoor work and get your fields ready; after that, build your house. (Proverbs 24:27).

These are astute assessments of what life is like in God’s world. In one sense, they do not stem from a special divine revelation. Any intelligent observer can see that if you spend time building your house before you have first provided a source of income or food, then you will sit in your beautiful house and starve. Anyone who has observed life, and thought about it, could come to this conclusion.

In his kindness, God has put us in a good and habitable world which is not chaotic or unpredictable. He has given us the ability (and the mandate) to make enough sense of the world, to live in it, and to rule it, however imperfectly.

Pragmatism, then, has a theological basis. It is because we expect one thing to follow (or be caused by) another, that we can make inferences and establish patterns and evolve techniques that ‘work’. To do what ‘works’, especially in the absence of other criteria, is a perfectly godly response.

However, there are problems. The world itself is flawed; it is orderly and good, yet it is also distorted and fallen and subject to decay. It doesn’t always behave predictably. More significantly, the people who inhabit it do not behave predictably and reliably. This makes the task of observation, induction and prediction very difficult.

However, not only is what we’re observing and trying to fathom flawed and distorted, we as observers are flawed and distorted as well. We make mistakes, we are influenced by our own sin, and perhaps most significantly we cannot see the whole. We can see order and cause and effect, and we can predict that certain things might lead to certain outcomes, but we cannot stand above it all and see the whole very complex picture. We can’t look ahead to see if something works long-term.

As a means of working out what to do, pure pragmatism (simply doing what works) is ultimately disastrous, not only because it is unreliable in the short-term (due to the fallen nature of the world and other people and ourselves), but even more significantly because we can’t chart whether it will work long-term or have other side-effects. And by then it is too late.

If we follow the Willow Creek or Saddleback models, for example, because they work, we have several problems: How well are they working? Can we assess the spiritual growth that is taking place? That is ultimately only visible in heaven. Even if we are convinced that it seems to be working now, can we predict with any reliability that the models and philosophies will transfer to different contexts, given the complexity of the world, and the unpredictable nature of social relationships? And can we ever know that it will work in the long-term. What if terrible consequences emerge in 15 years time that no-one has yet foreseen?

This is not just a problem with assessing church leadership and ministry models, but with all models and strategies. It is also the problem with the modern management and productivity theory on which much church growth theory is based. In what we might call the ‘Harvard MBA’.approach, the object is to find the most time- and cost-efficient way to get from point A to point B. However, what if the steps taken to get from A to B prevent you getting from E to F in the future? We do not know the future with any certainty, and we cannot account for all the variables that are at play in our decisions. It is nearly impossible to predict what harmful effects a particular course of action might have, even if it is the most obvious and efficient thing to do at present. The Millennium Bug debacle is the most obvious current example.

So it is when the latest Christian technique, package or movement comes along. Its proponents will invariably say, “This whole thing is really blessed by God. People’s lives are being changed by this. I’ve seen hardened criminals moved to tears and giving their lives to Christ. I’ve tried all sorts of things but this is something that is really getting results.”

To this we must reply: “How do you know? How can you judge whether it is really working? Do you have the perspective of heaven to know what fruit is really being born? Even if genuine change is occurring in people’s lives, how do we know that it is your new technique that is really doing the work? Might God not be working in spite of the new technique? And how can you tell what side-effects or collateral damage this technique (and its consequences) will have on your fellowship?”

This degree of pessimism about the limits of wisdom and what we can work out from observation is of course reflected in the Wisdom Literature itself, in Ecclesiastes and Job. In Ecclesiastes, we see how the fickleness of life and the indiscriminate reign of death turns much of our ‘wisdom’ into emptiness and frustration. And in Job, we see how our inability to see the whole, to see things from the standpoint of the heavenly council, means that we cannot understand the vagaries and sufferings of life. Only God can. And so we must display an appropriate humility in the face of suffering, because we simply don’t know. We can’t see the whole. We are not transcendent.

This is why the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Whatever we work out for ourselves must start with a profound humility regarding our position, and a certain pessimism about what we can ultimately achieve. Only God sees the whole, and therefore only God rightly understands what must be done with the particulars. For to truly understand particulars and how they relate to each other, and how they ‘work’. you must not only view the whole in all its variety, but view it in time—you must see where things are headed, what their purpose is. All this is only possible for God, and therefore only possible because of revelation.

Revelation must have a key role in telling us what to do, because simply following what seems at the time to ‘work’ (that is, pure pragmatism) in the end may not work at all, for all the reasons above. We need the heavenly perspective of the all-wise God, who sees and knows all, and it is this that we find in the Scriptures.

To summarize:

  • Since the world is created and sustained in an orderly way by a rational God, pragmatism is appropriate. We can successfully work some things out for ourselves. We can devise plans and see them to fruition. We can note that some things tend to work and some things don’t.
  • Yet there are serious limitations to the scope of pragmatism because of the complexity and fallenness of the world and ourselves, and because we are unable to see the whole, or the future.
  • Real wisdom, then, is not simply empirical, relying on observation, cleverness and good management. Real wisdom humbly fears the Lord, relying upon his revelation as the key to successful living and ministry.

So far we have said nothing very controversial, although the importance of the foundation we have laid will become apparent soon enough. The question remains, however: If the Bible is to guide our ministries—if we are to be ‘biblical’.how does it do so? How does God’s revelation relate to our pragmatism exactly? Does it provide certain limits or boundaries within which we can freely operate; or does it lay down the whole program for us to follow, from which we must not deviate, and to which we must not add; or is it neither of these?

To begin to explore these questions, we will now turn to two case studies or models for how the Bible should relate to Christian ministry. The first we will deal with in this article; the second, and the conclusions we may draw as we reflect on both, must wait for Part II (in our next Briefing).

Model #1: the Hooker Principle

Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is regarded by many as the Anglican theologian. Certainly, in scholarly circles, a veritable Hooker industry has grown, in describing, analysing and debating his theology. Partly because of the sheer breadth and subtlety of his output, and also because of the political motivations of some of his interpreters, Hooker is a much misunderstood figure. There has been a tendency for all the parties of Anglicanism to claim him as their champion, and to quote him to settle arguments.

The Anglo-Catholics, for example, portrayed Hooker as the architect of the so-called Anglican via media (‘middle way’), by which the Church of England sailed a calm middle path, with the protestant fanatics of Calvin’s Geneva on one side, and the corruptions of Rome on the other. As recent scholarship has shown, however, this portrait is really a distortion of Hooker, insofar as it plays down his ardent Reformation Protestantism. Hooker was a fierce ‘justification by faith alone’ man, who ascribed to standard Calvinist theology at most points, including regarding the Pope as the Antichrist. In fact, it is now accepted that Hooker had much more in common with Calvin and the continental reformers than has hitherto been supposed.

What is of interest to us, however, is Hooker’s dispute with the English Puritans in the latter years of the 16th century, for it was essentially about the issues of pragmatism and the Bible that we have been exploring above. The Puritans (who were themselves Anglicans, it must be remembered) were arguing that the reform of the Church of England had not gone far enough. To their mind, far too many popish ceremonies, vestments and church structures had been retained, most notably the episcopacy. Their position was that the Bible aloneshould dictate what we do in church, and how the church is governed, and that accordingly a form of presbyterianism ought to be enacted.

Hooker’s massive argument against the Puritan proposals is containedin his eight volume Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. It is a difficult task to render a brief summary of his argument in all its subtlety without distorting it, but the essence of his line of thought is as follows.

The real problem with the Puritans, Hooker suggested, was that they had failed to accurately understand the relationship between the ‘way of grace’ and the ‘way of nature’. According to Hooker, God had established a hierarchy of laws throughout the universe by which the various parts of it were governed. The laws of nature, for example, govern how creatures act and behave, and how the world keeps functioning; celestial law, as another example, binds and controls the angels of heaven. Each law is of a different nature, and serves a different purpose.

Among this variety of laws, all of which spring from the fount of heavenly wisdom, the law of Scripture is but one. It is an important one, for only in Scripture can salvation be found through union with Christ, and all things necessary for salvation are only to be found there. Even though reason is used as an instrument for understanding it, and tradition is the context in which we read it, in spiritual or divine matters, relating to doctrine and faith, Hooker maintained that the Scripture was supremely and only authoritative and sufficient (contrary to the teaching of Rome).

All the same, the Scripture is still a law of limited scope. “The principal intent of Scripture is to deliver the lawes of duties supernaturall”, which cannot be attained by human reason. It is not the purpose of Scripture to speak on every matter, and certainly not on those matters which are covered by other parts of God’s hierarchy of laws, which can be discovered by the light of human reason. Thus, in matters not necessary for salvation, men are quite free by the light of reason to make laws over and besides those in Scripture, and most of the laws for governing the affairs of the church fall into this category. As long as such laws are ‘not contrary’ to Scripture, and had been rightly and reasonably established by long practice of God’s Church (capital C), then these things should not be changed. And the longer they had been established by the consensus of reasonable men, the more likely they were to be in accordance with the hierarchy of God’s reasonable laws that permeated the universe. Therefore, Hooker concluded, with regard to the current state of play in Elizabethan Anglicanism, “equity and reason, the law of nature, God and man do all favour that which is in being”.

Hooker’s was a subtle and powerful argument, and the Puritans found it frustratingly difficult to answer. As we have already noted above, the world is an orderly place, created according to God’s wisdom. Because of the rational and orderly nature of the creation, it is possible for us work some things out and come to right conclusions, simply by using observation and reason. What is more, there are many aspects of life about which the Bible says little or nothing specifically. In such cases, are we not free to use our God-given reason to work things out?

All the same, the Puritans were not satisfied with Hooker’s answer. While sharing many of his presuppositions, they nevertheless wanted to argue that there was a difference between something being ‘not contrary’ to Scripture, and something being ‘according to’ or ‘grounded upon’ Scripture. They insisted that the voice of God in the Bible must not be ‘shut out’ or partitioned off into a spiritual realm where it could no longer speak to every situation. Indeed, some of the Puritans held to a version of the ‘Regulative Principle’ which says that only those things which are positively commanded or mandated in Scripture should be allowed to take place in church structures and forms.

For reasons that are too complex to go into here, the Puritans struggled to mount their argument successfully, and in the end the Establishment won the day.

Looking back, it is not hard to see how influential the ‘Hooker principle’ has been within Anglicanism. By separating matters of order and ceremony from matters of faith, and regarding the former as things to be established by the light of reason and respecting the weight of tradition (which is simply the long-established practice of reason), the forms and structures of ministry become very difficult to change. To change an established form or practice is to divert the course of a massive river of historic reason and practice. All the weight is on the side of things remaining as they are, and unless some direct command from Scripture can be found (which in most cases is difficult or impossible), the status quo will be maintained.

Whether consciously and deliberately drawing on Hooker or not, this kind of thinking is now so widespread within worldwide Anglicanism as to be itself a status quo. It can be a source of enormous frustration for evangelicals wishing to pursue innovation for the sake of gospel ministry. Even though the proposed change may be expedient, obvious and Scriptural, yet if the existing practice is reasonable, well-established and itself not contrary to Scripture, it may be very difficult to gain official approval for change.

How should we evaluate ‘the Hooker principle’? Given the constraints of space, and the need for some simplification, we could say that Hooker had too optimistic a view of reason, and too limited a view of Scripture.

With regard to reason, we should note the words of the Proverb: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Prov 16:25). As we saw above, there are real limits to the powers of reason to function effectively in the created order, and this limits the effectiveness of our judgement as to the best and most ‘reasonable’ course of action. We do not know enough, either about the current circumstances or about the future, to always make accurate judgements.

Moreover, we fool ourselves if we think that our ‘reason’ is an independent faculty, a kind of internal thinking machine that puts itself at our disposal. Our ‘reason’ is part of us, and as such participates in our sinful rebellion against God. Our reason is constantly compromised by the decisions we make, and the behaviour we practice. It is not aloof or independent. Hooker, it seems fair to suggest, participates in the error of Thomas Aquinas at this point in seeing our reason as too independent from the real me. Reason, on this view, may not be able to penetrate the mysteries of salvation (hence the need for divine revelation), but it functions perfectly well in respect to daily life in the world. This is not how the Bible sees us. We are not essentially a will, with a largely unimpaired reason at our disposal. We are reasoning, willing beings, whose reasoning capacities are skewed and distorted by the ungodly decisions we make (cf. Jn 3:19).1

In other words, Hooker seems to overlook the fact that the supposedly reasonable judgements of the Church authorities in matters of ceremony and order are not impartial, independent and disinterested. They are informed and shaped by all manner of things, not least of which are underlying theological presuppositions. And these presuppositions may be incorrect or unbalanced.

Thus, Hooker’s overly optimistic view of reason is related to his overly limited view of Scripture. What we understand from the Bible about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the purpose of life, the nature of humanity, the church, and so on, will affect our judgements in all sorts of ways, even in those areas on which the Bible itself says nothing specific. Theology will invariably drive practice. The New Testament is silent, for example, on the kind of clothing that preacher or pastor ought to wear in a church gathering. Yet it would be wrong to suggest the living and active word of God therefore had nothing to say in relation to the subject. To give just two examples, the positive principles of unity, mutual respect, love and edification in 1 Corinthians 12- 14, as well as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, should both have some influence in shaping our decisions in this area. Any proposal for what a pastor should wear will itself reflect and express a particular theology of church and ministry.

The Bible itself recognizes this, and continually goes back to the big issues of theology in order to solve individual and particular issues of pastoral concern or practice. It thus becomes very difficult, if not arbitrary, to draw a line between ‘supernatural’ or ‘divine’ law as contained in the Scripture, and ‘ecclesiastical’ law which is devised by the Church authorities.

We will give more thought to all of this later, but first we must examine another very influential model of relating the Bible to Christian life and ministry. It is a model that at first glance seems almost as different from Hooker’s Elizabethan Anglicanism as could be possible. At closer examination, however, we will see that they share a great deal. I am talking about the modern use of the Bible typified by the church growth movement.

To be continued …

Endnotes

1 I am aware that this paragraph introduces a host of complex issues relating to natural law and natural theology. I apologise for being unable to give them proper attention here.

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