Throwback Sundays

I have a confession. I love “Throwback Thursdays” on Facebook. The concept is simple: Post a “retro” photo of yourself or someone you know and delight in how much has changed. Be prepared, however, to take some good-natured ribbing about how you looked so long ago; anything from culture (huge cell phones) to fashion (1980s zipper pants) to outrageous hairdos (almost always a mistake!). Throwback Thursdays are a delightful way to reflect on how much has changed over the years.

I’ve wondered lately, however, whether in our leadership preparation for Christ’s Church we are in danger of creating TBS, Throwback Sundays. From coast to coast it is obvious that the 1950s are long gone—back when the fumes of Christendom used the culture and social norms to encourage people’s participation in local mainline churches. Today, when no one is socially compelled to be involved in a worshipping community, we talk about innovative, emerging and missional leadership in the church, but I worry sometimes that we are still too often preparing people for TBS, Throwback Sundays.

For example, I have heard it said that the way we teach the Bible, whether in seminary on a Tuesday morning or a church parlour on a Wednesday night, is primarily an attempt to break down a pre-critical understanding of scripture. In other words, to borrow from the teaching of Paul Ricoeur, one of today’s best-loved hermeneutical theorists, what we need to do is to take people from their “first naiveté” through “critical reflection” to a “second naiveté.” Now, to be honest, I love this language. As someone who strives to help form “scholarly evangelists” for Christ’s church, I’ve been using Ricoeur’s three steps for years in teaching and preaching. The challenge is the assumption some people make regarding the first naiveté that is found today in post-Christendom Canada. For a long time now in seminary, the assumption has been that leaders should assume that the first naiveté is a dogged, uncritical biblical literalism. The educator’s role, therefore, was to break that “naive” viewpoint in order to lead people (and their worshipping communities) to a more nuanced and historical-critical understanding of the Bible. I get that.

The “hermeneutics of suspicion” have brought us a long way from the naiveté of the old days. But after pastoring growing congregations across our post-Christendom country, I’ve found that the first naiveté is no longer biblical literalism. Most pre-Christian people I interact with at the coffee shop, gym or campus express a first naiveté that lacks any authority for scripture whatsoever. When I look at the world that will soon be in the hands of my own greying and aging Gen-X as well as the spunky, emerging Millennials, there is an absence of biblical literalism and an abundance of non-critical biblical skepticism in the Canadian landscape.

And it’s not just in the world around us; it also lurks quietly in the church. The hermeneutics of suspicion require no fertilizer in a postmodern, post-Christendom world—it grows like moss beneath humanity’s feet, leaving an agnostic odor at best, and detached, cold, “country club” civil religion at its worst.

Ironically, we live in a time when we know more and less about the Bible. Today’s scholars offer us wonderful tools to study scripture, from source criticism to feminist and liberationist approaches. Yet the result has often been that people in the church feel better informed but further away from the Bible. It’s like a car that was once easy to repair on our own but now needs a specialist to run fancy diagnostic tests to fix the transmission or change the oil.

I worry that, over time, we in the mainline churches have lost more than our biblical literacy; we’ve lost our trust that the Triune God can and does speak to us through scripture. That’s why I’ve always loved the prayer for illumination in our Reformed tradition that is shared before reading the Bible in public worship—the acknowledgment that anyone can read the Bible, but to truly understand God’s wisdom, we need the help of the Holy Spirit. It’s a gentle nod towards our longing for Calvin’s teaching that we require the inward witness of the Holy Spirit to understand the Bible. Don’t get me wrong, I love the benefits that the hermeneutics of suspicion have brought us by raising awareness of things like patriarchy in the cultures in which the Bible was written. But I worry that we have become so suspicious that we no longer live in expectation of revelation when we approach the word of God. I don’t want to send our teaching and ruling elders out into the world Christ died to save with a “TBS” approach to sharing the good news. In post-Christendom Canada, our leadershift should include an equal dose of a hermeneutics of grace. Zipper pants and mesh shirts were great for the ‘80s, but our sovereign God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit goes ahead and invites us to follow. A pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night. Be not afraid.